Pre-emptive Mourning

Pre-emptive mourning. That is the only way I can accurately describe this feeling. Have you ever grieved the loss of someone you did not love, or had not even met yet?

I have spent nights lying awake anticipating the death of my future spouse, when I am nowhere close to being a married woman, let alone an actual grown woman, and it hurts so much that I have to try not to wake up my sibling across the hall. It hurts so much that I am afraid the trembles that run through my bones as I cry will travel through the walls of my house.

I lay there, anticipating the feeling I will get when I wake up and find out he is not there anymore. I torture myself with images of his frail body or pale skin and this idea that he will eventually be gone -- that one day I might wake up and feel that his skin beside me is cold and that the little snores he makes, the little snores that I love, are no longer audible.

And I feel this so harshly that it hurts every part of me, when I do not even live alone. I do not even have a bed that I can share and yet I am grieving the idea of the death of the person who will sleep next to me.

Pre-emptive mourning. In preparation for something that I will not need to feel for decades. Or is it even preparation? Is it my body warning me that eventually it will hurt this much and that I am not strong enough yet? Or is it just my mind torturing my soul because it is the only thing it can think to do at two o'clock in the morning?

I can feel the love for this person. I can feel it as I imagine rolling over him and crying because he is not the warm person that he is supposed to be. That I will feel his neck and open his eyes and find no life in them. That one day I will watch him be put in the ground and that I will cry for the rest of my life because he made me feel so special and so loved, because I know I will never settle for anyone who makes me feel any less than that.

Why? Why am I nineteen and spending my nights grieving over something that I will not have to deal with for over fifty years? When the tears in my eyes are so blinding that I can barely text how I am feeling, and instead need to let myself go through it alone.

Have you ever felt this way? That every bone in your body might shatter, that every tear in your eyes will make it's way to the surface, every breath you will ever take will come out of your lungs so there is no air left, and you cannot breathe? And it hurts more than how you felt on those days that little you came home from school, anxious and broke down. But now it is not about you, it is about the man you will say yes to, and it hurts more than anything in the world.

Pre-emptive mourning over a man I will love forever, a man I will say yes to, a man I will be with in sickness and in health, when I have not even said my I do's. What a torturous feeling it is.

This is a work I recently came across that I wrote as an angsty teenager. I didn't realize how dramatic I was in my writing endeavors... haha. I was not sure exactly where to post this, as it can definitely be read as fiction, or as a kind of journalistic entry, and it isn't exactly poetry, but feels like it has a poetry undertone.

I hope you enjoyed. Thank you so much for reading to the end! If you like my work, please check out my page!

Thanks, again! <3