Losing a loved one is like
Losing a part of yourself, they say.

It's like,
The excruciating withdrawal from
An addiction of decades,
And five stages of grief,
Fifteen times over,
Simultaneously,
They say.

But for you,
Your very first trauma
Left a void so dark
With tendrils wrapped around
Each of your ventricle of your heart,
And it can no longer beat beyond
Barely keeping you alive,
With no energy left
For ecstasy or grief
And so now death...
Is but a blip.

An immeasurable crest
On an ECG,
A detached observation;
Dispassionate, but uncruel.

But the absence is incessant.
The absence... will linger.
Not stubbornly, but matter-of-factly.

And four months from now,
When you've had too many smiles
And too few catastrophes,
that, is when the absence
Will make you feel it's presence
And you will break down then,
At the wrong place
At the wrong time
In the wrong context
And perhaps,
You'll justify it
Like I did
In a poem written
In third person
Just as detached from reality
As you are now.

You grief will begin,
When everyone else's
Has ended.

To you, my friend,
Death will always be
A posthumous sorrow.

-Abdullah Alam