the understory of grief

17th march 2025

what is more potent than grief's silent ability to tether us to worlds that no longer exist? 

you don't know that i'm learning to live without you. happiness almost feels like cheating when it visits me now, because you're no longer here to see it bloom. the colour has returned to my cheeks, and so many of my old dreams have come off their shelves and burst into fruition. but even as i pour myself into the spaces you left, i realise how much you have become the architect of every quiet corner of my life. 

i miss you, painfully. your memories don't arrive with fanfare. they sneak up on me in the ordinary and mundane — in the shape of tea cups, sounds of classical music. sometimes i think that my piano can still feel the ghost of your touch against its keys. i miss you equally in the quietest hours of the night and the breaking of the dawn, when the first rays of sunlight that once painted your hair golden illuminate a bare pillow instead. 

although the edges of this grief have softened, it still aches after all this time. and how strange it feels to belong to both life and death — the desire to outrun the version of myself that lost you, and the reluctance to let go of the only tether to you i have left. unable to fully occupy both spaces at once, i linger aimlessly, rendering myself placeless in either. 

one day i'll have built a new life around the grief of losing you, and i'll have learnt to carry it all differently somehow. i think, in so many ways, i already have. but i know that i will never be untouched by you again. and i am still learning how to write that sentence without fear.