Things fall away

Sometimes, in life, you stagger on with your arms full of the things you want to hold on to, when it is obvious that the extent of your embrace only encompasses that much, and the clasp of your arms reaches only so far.

But your dull recognition of this sad fact only begins when things start to slip and tumble from over, under, and between your arms, and the rest of the items still wrought in your grasp reorientate themselves to fill in the gaps left by what fell away. And then you are aware of nothing but the burgeoning, unbearable lightness that is left in your clutches, and you heave and ache with the grievous weight of a vacuum in your arms, while the entire world is running out to sea around you.

And still you stagger on like a dismantling doll, bleeding from the holes left behind when parts of you came off together with the pieces of your world that fell away, disintegrating into the backwash with a final whispering hiss, that is the last breath of loss.