Grief creeps in from the most unexpected places.
A scent on an old sweater. A song playing too softly in the background.
The way the sun sets just a little differently than it used to.
Do they realize how much they are missed?
How their absence carves through flesh like a phantom limb that never stops aching?
What if I forget? The way their eyes squinted when they smiled, like the world had never been cruel to them.
The laughter that poured into me like warm honey, settling in places I didn’t know were hollow. The little quirks—favorite songs I never cared for but learned to love, the way they held their cup, the exact way they said my name.
What if time steals it all from me, one detail at a time, until they are nothing but a whisper on my skin?
Some days, the absence is quiet, a soft hum in the background of my life. Other days, it’s a thunderclap in an empty room—deafening, suffocating.
Like all the oxygen in this world has been sucked away, and I am left gasping, clawing at the remnants they left behind, hoping to gather enough to breathe again.
I have only ever known one way to heal—to be pulled back into the warmth of their body, buried under their heat, shielded from the cold edges of reality. But reality doesn’t bargain.
Do we ever truly understand what we lose along the way?
We tell ourselves, “There are plenty of fish in the sea,” a mantra of comfort wrapped in delusion—until we find ourselves sifting through coal, hands blackened, lungs heavy, realizing we once held a diamond and let it slip through our fingers.
Endings don’t come with warning signs.
They don’t wait for us to be ready. They come like a thief in the night, unraveling everything we built, leaving us scrambling to loosen the noose of memories around our throats—only for it to tighten, until our hands are too weak to fight it.
Grief is love that has nowhere to go. And I am drowning in it.
~©Darkpit
