Grief doesn’t always arrive in dramatic waves. Sometimes, it settles in silence. It sneaks in quietly, in the space between sentences, in the hitch of a breath, in the moment you pause just a second too long before answering. That’s when I first felt it—the ache of losing someone not through a sharp, sudden end, but through a gradual, quiet unraveling.
I had always thought loss would feel like fire, something that burns bright and loud and final. But when you left, it felt like mist: soft, shapeless, inescapable. It clung to everything. It wasn’t the dramatic sobs or shattered glass I expected—it was stillness. It was the echo of laughter that no longer had a source, the melody of a half-finished song that trailed off into memory.
I find you everywhere in your absence. In the smell of books we read together. In the quiet of rooms we once filled with careless words and easy silences. In the way I pause before speaking, instinctively waiting for your response. And when nothing comes, that’s when it stings most—not because you’re gone, but because you were once so incredibly here.
Sometimes I write you letters I’ll never send. I write them to remember, to speak into the void, to pretend there’s still a line connecting us. But even my words feel out of place now. They tumble out clumsily, not quite reaching the rhythm they once had when I knew you were listening. The sentences scatter across the page like the pieces of a heart I no longer know how to hold together.
I know letting go is supposed to be healing. I also know that healing doesn’t always look like hope. Sometimes, it looks like resignation. Like watching your heart scatter in the wind and deciding not to chase the pieces. I’ve started to believe it might be easier that way—to let the pieces drift, to allow the wind to take them far from me. Maybe it’s easier to feel nothing at all.
Because what do you do when the person who held your heart becomes the space you avoid?
You were my home. And now I wander through days like a stranger in my own life—tracing back steps, peering into rooms that feel haunted by your absence. Not with fear, but with a quiet longing I don’t quite know how to name. A scent, a shape, a glimpse of a memory—and suddenly I’m drowning in a tide of everything we were, everything we almost were.
It’s not just missing you. It’s missing the version of myself that existed when you were around. That person feels like a ghost now—someone who once smiled with certainty, who believed in shared futures, who didn’t hesitate to speak her heart out loud. Maybe that’s the real grief: not just losing you, but losing parts of myself along with you.
Some days I wonder if I’ve become unrecognizable. If I’ve turned into someone frail, someone too stuck in memories. But then I remind myself that grief is not weakness. That feeling too much is not a flaw. That love, even in its absence, leaves behind echoes that mean we were here, we were real.
So I write. Not because it fixes anything, but because it reminds me I’m still here. My words may not reach you. They may float in empty space, unresolved. But maybe they’re not for you anymore. Maybe they’re for me.
And then I smile—because deep down, I know you always knew that.