Delayed Grief
I hate that your absence
became so ordinary
that the silence stopped surprising me,
that days passed without the echo of your laugh,
that in the weeks following your departure
things still had a feeling of normalcy.
Three months.
You left unwillingly
but somehow ready—
a paradox I still turn over like a stone
in the palm of grief.
I walk streets you knew better than I do.
I see you
in coffee shop corners,
in the curve of someone else’s smile,
in the songs that shuffle
at the worst
and best times.
I wonder how you'd laugh here,
what you'd say about the way my life
is becoming something
you’ll never get to know.
Your friends are becoming mine.
Maybe we’re all
just clutching splinters of you,
trying to reassemble
what we can no longer touch.
You lived vicariously through me,
wild, untethered,
while I watched you build
the life I once swore I'd wanted,
steady, secure, and known.
Now I try to find
a midpoint
between wings and roots
with no compass left
but memory.
It’s strange—
this future you’re not in.
Stranger still
that every tomorrow
builds a distance
between us.
You knew me
like breath,
like the space between words,
like the history I never had to explain.
Now no one knows me
entirely.
There’s a new grief
underneath the old:
I miss you,
and I miss God.
Or the version of me
who believed
you’d be somewhere,
not just
nowhere.
The ache of faith lost
feels like losing you twice.
Some days
I pretend I’m healing.
Other days,
I just exist,
half-lit.
I think I’ll always
be learning
how to live
without your voice
in the next room,
your knowing glance,
your tether to the earth.
Maybe I’ll never learn.
But maybe that’s love in grief—
to never stop
trying.