"A Place Called Grief" by Joshua Ginsberg

A Place Called Grief

by Joshua Ginsberg

Ever since his eighteenth birthday, when he awoke in a hospital bed, pained and confused by his many broken bones and deep lacerations, Terrance had been stalked by a place called Grief. This was right after his first visit to Grief, during his week-long coma brought about by a car accident that left a map of scars over his body, robbed him of sight in his left eye due to a subdural hematoma, and took the life of his best friend, who had been driving the safety orange Toyota Corolla when a black Ford F-150 blew a traffic light and smashed into it.

He knew that he was lucky to be alive, everyone told him so, but knowing that did little to ameliorate his physical pain, and even less for the deeper, invisible scars left by the absence of his friend and the shame and guilt at having survived him.

Terrance adjusted though, as best he could. It wasn’t until he was being driven back home for the first time that he glimpsed it in the rearview mirror – a dilapidated wooden shed, leaning precariously to one side, that he recognized it as having belonged to that other place, forever shrouded in mist, fading light, and failing memory.

Later, when he woke up in his own bed and looked out the window, again he saw it, far off in the distance and through the trees – the yellow halo of a streetlight where there was not and had never ever been any street. But he knew without question, deep as the metal pins in his bones, where that ghost street led.

Over time, he got used to seeing Grief, though if he looked at it too long or hard it would make him shudder. Sometimes its sad hovels and houses lurked in the reflection of a windowpane, or it waited for him around banks of lockers at school, or peaked at him through a cracked door at the far end of the waiting room where he met with a psychologist twice weekly. He told his doctors about what he saw, but neither they nor friends, family, classmates, nor, as he got older, lovers and colleagues, every caught sight of it. So he ceased mentioning it, though he saw it still.

He went to college in Boston and studied fine art. Prior to his accident, most assumed that he would follow either his mother’s path into engineering or his father’s into law, both of which were professions with rules and logic as their foundation, but after his brief visit to Grief, he came back altered in ways both obvious and subtle. While he was a student in the city, on a train late at night, he would be surprised by the sight of impossible things in the distance between old brick buildings and alleyways, like a farmhouse on a hill rising over a sea of fog. More than once when he visited a beach, far out over the water he noticed what looked like a storefront hovering over the waves. Other times it was close enough that he might pass by a restaurant and peer through its windows only to be confronted by an interior quite different from what he expected. Occasionally, these spaces were populated by one or more of the grim, grey-skinned, cadaverous permanent residents of Grief. He could feel the weight of their milky white eyes, as unseeing as his own left one was. He even felt their blind stares from under lids that had been sewn shut. 

Every so often, while he slept, Grief would find its way back to him. In these dreams, he arrived at the local tavern where the barkeep, a man with limp, pale blond hair that fell like a curtain over half his face would set him up with a drink and they would talk. Their conversations often went as follows.

“Where… am I?” Terrance would ask.

“You’re in Grief, again,” the barkeep might respond.

“Where… is that, exactly? What state am I in?”

“Grief. Like I just told you.”

“I’ve been here before, haven’t I?”

“Longer than most who just pass through. But everyone, in their own way and time, comes to Grief.”

“I don’t understand. This place, it follows me, doesn’t it?”

“Could be so. Grief has a different relationship with everyone, and just because you left it, doesn’t mean that it is ready to leave you.”

Terrance would look around the room as he tried to wrap his head around what the barkeep told him, and see other faces that looked familiar. An aunt that had passed away, or his second-grade teacher, who was the very first adult he’d ever seen in a coffin at a funeral. Once or twice he spotted his old friend who had died in the car wreck. But whenever he approached any of them, as he drew closer, he’d see that he didn’t really know them at all.

“Why does that happen?” he’d ask the barkeep as he washed and dried off glassware.

The barkeep would shrug. “Grief can play tricks on you, make you think you see things that aren’t there. Or not see things that are. It’s like that.”

“Confusing.”

“For some, but there’s still a kind of logic to it. Different kind though.”

“How so?”

“Well, for one thing, here we mostly answer with questions, and question our answers.”

At some point, Terrance would return to himself and remember little if anything of his unconscious travels. Eventually Grief settled into the background of his life, though it could well be that it seeped into the strange canvasses he painted which were compared often and favorably to those of Francis Bacon. 

Not surprisingly, these sold quite well. Many collectors were drawn to them, but none could say quite why. Perhaps it reminded them of something Terrance knew far better than most. That no matter where any of us happen to be, we’re never really all that far from Grief.