The Grand Canyon

Our arrival here was punctuated by the news of your passing and suddenly this Grand Canyon became a grave, as if God himself had scratched his fingernail across the continent and left a giant gash that could not contain my ocean of grief. I wanted to lay in the bottom with the Colorado river boiling at my back and the weight of the heavens above me pushing me into the rocks and dust of a hundred million years. I wanted to feel small and insignificant, as powerless as this landscape in the face of time and erosion. I wanted to scream at the beauty for the affront of being beautiful on a day when so much was taken. How dare you? How dare you surround me in awe and glory on this day? I want to see the thorny cactus and the dry unforgiving desert. I want to feel the heat. I want an unquenchable thirst. I want my tongue to turn to dust, this useless thing in my mouth that cannot speak the magnitude of my grief. How dare you let my eyes see the unfathomable beauty? How dare you let my feet walk down into the millennia as if the very ground itself were embracing me in its folds, within it's timeless evolution. All of it, the river, the canyon, the sun and the stars, the endless work of eternity, stopped today and then began again without you.