When The World Moves On

Everyone assumes the first few months will be hard.

There are flowers on your doorstep that end up dying too. There is food you can’t eat - just enough to remind you of the size of your family when your person was still here.

There is a funeral, and although you are so cut open by grief you can barely breathe - a part of you realizes even then - that this is the final time your two circles will intertwine, all together in one space. No one else sees the grief in that.

The biggest grief is in the losing of yourself.

Sometimes you barely recognize who you are. You hear words come out of your mouth that sound like someone else. You are possessed by your grief.

You wonder distantly if you will always be this way - jumping at the smallest sound, waiting for the next shoe to drop, unable to sleep or eat, incapable of answering the one message everybody seems to send: “Let me know if there’s anything I can do.”

There is nothing and there is everything. There is really only one thing you want & that is the one thing that is impossible now. How could you possibly respond?

It’s interesting, isn’t it? How over time - your grief becomes more real for you almost in tandem with its normalization for the rest of the world.

As if the months & years make it make any more sense.

You find your loss lives mostly in the day-to-day. It’s the quiet moments that nobody else sees. The nights spent making dinner alone, the new song you discover that you yearn to share with them, the story you can’t quite remember the ending to, the moment you reflexively reach for your phone years later - to text them something simple & mundane.

You realize that these moments are what truly make up a shared life. You realize now how sacred they were.

Isn’t it wild, how you can begin to wrap your mind & heart around something so vast, while your soul incessantly screams out in disbelief? 

How you slowly learn to feel joy & gratitude - and how hard you need to work for it.

The pride that exists in the quiet moments - often unseen. But how you learn to see it in yourself. Because now, you have to. 

The beauty uncovered - so deep & so pure. A beauty others can’t yet understand. 

And how it all exists at once somehow - and how this inevitably stretches you. 🤍