"They love each other/There is no loneliness like theirs."

-James Wright

This poem seems so applicable in so many ways today.

Yesterday I held some of the strongest, bravest, 'toughest' men I know while they cried. Some of them tried to hide it behind sunglasses, like grieving widows or mob bosses in the movies. Some didn't hide anything at all. Their noses ran, their hands shook around my shoulders.

They all clung to me like somehow I might give them some answers. Like they wanted to be held by their mothers or wives, but had neither, anymore.

Yesterday was the first time in two years I'd ever seen Choi look old. We all look up to him, if for no other reason, as impenetrable. At almost 60 years old, he still has the body that a lifetime of hard work and hard fighting gave him. He is the embodiment of the banners in the gym that he likes to invoke, every time someone pauses jumping rope, or tries to slack and take a round off: Never Give Up. No Sweat, No Champion. Last night, he looked defeated. He wasn't smiling. His head was bowed. He looked his age, instead of twenty years younger.

There is no comfort for that.

Five days ago, all I could think of was that I wanted my mother. We arrived back from camp dusty and exhausted, feeling some small sense of triumph, in that we'd survived four days without running water or electricity while herding other people's kids around, making God's eyes and friendship bracelets and singing "The Bean Song" for hours and hours.

An hour after walking in the door, I was told:

Lucas is dead.
I think we should put it on the shelf.

Disparate statements, to be sure. Funny how we struggle, day after day, to control these small pieces of our lives that calve, like glaciers, away from us. I live in truisms now, the ones I hate, and swore I'd never use. Cliche.

One day at a time.
"For now."
It is what it is.
If it's meant to be...

I can't number the amount of times I've hated the asshole who came up with that one, the one about things that are 'meant to be' coming back to us. But I can't ignore it, insipid as it is, either, can't stop myself from repeating it in the morning in the shower, in the evening curled up in the narrow bed (there's only room for one, you see).

I still want my mother, still want someone else to collect the pieces, to shepherd them back to shore. There are still so many things to look forward to, everyone says. So many things you haven't done. Places left to go. Go.

There is no loneliness like this, is there? I'm rooted in it, stuck in a kitchen chair every morning, stuck in my own head all day. I cling to what I hope will happen, what I want more than anything, a child clinging to a tattered stuffed animal, but the voice of what seems to be reason now has to be my own, so I wake up, and I am startled and then saddened all at once by this emptiness, and I repeat to myself again and again, prying myself away one clenched fist at a time...

Let go. Let go let go let go.