Of Grief

Grief is a room I sit in, in the house of loneliness. Every window takes me out, but I want a door. Here, memories fall like dust, settling on furniture no one uses anymore. I count days by the shadows that crawl across the wall - today’s shadow looks like your smile, yesterday’s like how you stepped on my shadow.

I’m fishing down my heart, throwing lines into the deep waters of yesterday, hoping to catch something that still moves. Sometimes, I pull up empty hooks, sometimes tangled weeds of what-could-have-beens and sometimes my heart itself. The clock on the wall has forgotten to tick, or perhaps I’ve forgotten to listen.

Time passes strangely here. I fold and unfold moments like origami - a sea of promises that never sailed. Outside, life marches on in its clockwork precision - eat, sleep, wake, repeat. Inside, I am perpetually paused, a photograph of waiting.

But here’s the strange thing about grief - it’s the only room in the world where you can hear your heart beating. In the quiet, in the dust, in the shadows, something grows. Not hope exactly, not yet. But a kind of knowing. That even empty rooms hold air, that even still waters move beneath their surface, that even frozen clocks tell the right time twice a day.

Perhaps grief isn’t the room at all. Perhaps grief is the light that sneaks under the door, showing me where to place my feet. To grieve is to walk in the dark at home - familiar yet strange. Perhaps it’s not about finding the door anymore, but about understanding that some rooms are meant to change us before they let us leave.

I’m still here, still fishing in my heart. But now I know - even in the deepest waters, something always glimmers back. 

Ps. My heart is full of salt now.