The Grey Hour
灰色の刻
There is a season in grief that has no drama, no tears, no rage, and it is by far the hardest to describe.
The world did not go dark, which one could at least have dramatised; it went grey, and greyness resists all dramatisation.
Colour drained from things not violently but by degrees, the way warmth leaves a room when no one tends the dying fire.
I woke. I did not want to wake. I rose because rising was easier, marginally, than explaining to myself why I would not.
The days were identical, and their identity was the point: , unhurried, unremarkable, unending, one grey hour laid upon another.
Food had no taste. Music had no pull. Books, my lifelong companions, lay open and unread, their sentences sliding harmlessly off my mind.
This was not sadness, exactly, for sadness has an object, and I could no longer locate an object for anything at all.
It was rather an absence of appetite for the world, a flatness, a listlessness that made even sorrow seem far too strenuous.
The doctors have a word, , the inability to feel pleasure, and I turned it over, dully, as one turns a cold stone.
Even my grief, which had at least been vivid, now dimmed; I could no longer feel her absence sharply, only heavily.
And that frightened me, in whatever way fear could still reach me, for to stop hurting felt like a second forgetting.
If the pain faded, would she fade with it? Was my suffering the last room in which she somehow, faintly, still lived?
I let the post pile up. I let the plants go dry. I watched the light cross the floor and could not persuade myself to move.
Time, which grief had made unbearable, now became simply irrelevant, a river I sat beside with no wish whatsoever to cross.
The language, too, deserted me; I who had built a life on words found words , pointless, impossibly heavy to lift.
To speak required a translation of feeling into sound for which I no longer possessed the strength, or the reason.
Friends called, and I let their voices wash over me, warm and far away, like weather happening to somebody else.
I was not in despair, which is at least a passion; I was in something quieter and colder, a low, unlit country.
, the old writers called it, and I saw why they had named it a sin: it is a slow refusal of the given world.
Yet it did not feel like refusal; it felt like exhaustion, like a body that has run too far and simply lies down in the road.
Nothing happened in the grey hour, and its not-happening stretched, unmeasured, across a of identical afternoons.
I do not know how long it lasted, because the grey hour quietly erases the very by which duration is felt.
What ended it was nothing grand: a bird, one morning, on the sill, going about its small unimportant business in the sun.
I watched it for a while, and felt, faintly, the thin edge of something that was not quite interest but pointed toward it.
The greyness did not lift so much as thin, admitting, at its far margin, a single thread of colour.
I made tea. I drank it. The tea was warm, and the warmth was, for once, a fact that I could actually feel.
It was not recovery; it was only a bird, and a cup, and a man noticing, for one moment, that he had noticed.
But noticing, I would learn, is the very door through which everything returns, including the guest I had spent so long trying to .