The Unsaid Words...

Grief. A five letter word that carries the weight of entire lifetimes. 

For the longest time, I believed that grief was merely another shade of sadness, a passing visitor destined to leave as quietly as it came. But grief was like no other emotion, it didn't knock, linger around for just a while and leave. It settled in the hollow spaces that were left behind by your passing and replaced the home that you made there. 

There is an irony to it: the emotion that is born from losing someone or something if often the one that refuses to leave. Long after the tears have dried up and the whole world seems to have moved forward, grief remained, it became my silent companion intertwined into my memories, tucked between the heartbeat and carried in the smallest reminders of what was. 

I thought grief began the day you left me. But looking back I realize it had taken root long before you were gone.

It lived in every prayer I whispered for your health, in every sleepless night spent imagining a world without you. It lingered in the moments I weighed the impossible choice of letting you go, and in the quiet ache that followed when I finally decided I must.

It was there the day I heard what had happened, settling heavily into my chest like a truth I could no longer run from. And it remained the day I stopped waiting for you, the day I accepted that some doors never reopen, no matter how long you stand before them.

I thought grief arrived with your absence, but it had been walking beside me all along, growing in the spaces between hope and reality, love and loss.

By the time you were gone, grief was already familiar. It had learned my name long before I learned its.

Perhaps grief is love with nowhere to go. And that is why it stays.