by Marissa Harris · November 11, 2025

(untitled draft)

we were always meant / (to lose) /
you & i—
small inheritors of some
salt-rusted shipwreck breath,
two fathers with
the same blue lungs / mind /
silent & full /
not waving (but still here)
long after
the clocks stopped ticking.

love,
it pooled in cupped hands—
soft birds / knuckleless hands and gentle rubbed feet /
the ache of
what-we-couldn't-save:
a man, a sun, a seed.

you held me like this:
(his hands inside yours)
mine, inside yours—
decades apart,
but no further than
the gravity of grief
could stretch.

this was always the game:
to carry the same death /
wear the same sky /
breathe the same (humbled) air.
to find—
when we looked back—
a pattern /
(we didn't know
we were drawing).

the world was never simple /
only soft around the edges /
like youth:
fluid /
(unsuspecting) /
& already unraveling.

i ask what grief teaches.
it says:
everything (is)
& everything (goes)
& still—
the hands that hold
are the same hands
that let go.

it says:
you knew.
you knew.
even when you didn’t.

& still—
there are fathers everywhere,
bending,
picking up
sticks
in the sun.

these are the lessons of grief

no one (really) understands—
dark
matter.

nor the full (capacity) of
black.holes.
(that’s the point?)
not to unmake
the mystery—

because:
we—weren’t—meant
to de.rail a life / builtoflove.

but:
brick i brick you
(we) make walls (of air)
& grief
spins us out / & in / & out again—
exacerbates
(exhales)
us.

building (apart)
what always wanted
to collapse: together.

yet (together)
is our gravity:
always—
is what tethers (entangles) love
through bone-dark quiets
of unseen.

i ask grief:

           what

are you teaching(me)now?

grief,
like the soft collapse of stars
pulses:

everything.

i teach you:
the ways of unbearable—
the spin
the fall
the keep
(the stay).

how even
when (unraveling)
you— remain.

entangled.
forever:
drift/held
known/unknowing.

(still)
afterring into —
(what was)
(what is)
(whatwillbe)
bendinglight—
until
nothing (but love)
remains.

grief (like planets
& other quiet things)
isn’t here
to be understood—

unmeasured,

it simply
is.

love is.