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Seven a.m.

They say grief never really leaves. It stays, like the scar on your knee after falling off a bike, like the stain on your favorite white T-shirt. They say  you grow around grief. But they don’t tell you that after three hundred thirteen days, grief evolves. Grief no longer knocks at midnight. Now it barges through my door at seven in the morning. It waits for me in the bathroom mirror, slips into the ten quiet minutes I spare before getting ready for work. It swallows me whole as I brush my teeth, wash my face, scrub a body that still carries your scent I cannot rub off. Grief has rusted the edges of my hair straightener, leaving me with a screeching sound that burns into my ears with the question: does it matter being pretty on days you don’t see me? Grief strikes at seven, primes my face with tears, and holds me hostage until eight. Three hundred thirteen days I’ve learned how to dodge the grief that crawls under my blanket before I sleep. But I still don’t know how to escape the...
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Wedding Dress

Behind every wedding dress I wonder how many tears have been spilled? I wonder if her cream white dress bleached with mine. I wonder if the laces around her shoulders  spun from the webs my fingers knotted in prayer, waiting for him to come back. Was her veil stitched from the sighs I breathed heavily into the dark? Were her pink lips tinted from the roses I watered faithfully in his garden? I wonder if the dreams I spent so much time dreaming, were nothing but bricks  to build her altar. Behind every wedding dress, I wonder how much of her joy was made from my ruin.
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Third Tide

First Tide The first time I thought about dying, I was fifteen. I was watching New Moon when I saw Bella standing at the edge of a cliff, ready to jump. Ever since then, every time I visit the sea,  I watch as the waves break against the rocks and imagine what if instead of the water it was my body. Will the water still be blue Will the wind still sing Or will it be dark and silent? Second Tide I went to Phuket this year. I ran to the white sand beach, let the salty water wash the blisters still raw on my feet after walking away from you. I could feel the waves pulled me closer, held me tight— a familiar embrace the way yours once felt. I let the water replace the grief that lived in my lungs and realized  the only way to remove pain was to replace it with another. Then it hit me. Clarity flooded down my brain, memories pounded in my chest for all the names I no longer say, faces I tried to buried  rose to the surface. I gasped. But all I inhaled was the air you used to r...
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Terrifying Thoughts

Don’t get me wrong, I am happy. I write about you less and less. Most days, I just let the words sit with me  for minutes, sometimes hours,  as I drive through the streets still stained with your name. I think about you and then I forget. With enough distractions, enough someone elses, months later, what once was an open wound is now just a bruise. The kind you forget is there but still hurts when you touch it. They didn’t lie, time heals after all. So maybe the worst is over. Even if some nights, I still catch myself awake past midnight wondering where’s that one piece of me that went missing and never came back. But still, don’t get me wrong, I am happy. Even if happy doesn’t mean whole and definitely doesn’t mean complete. Maybe all of this is just my way of saying I miss you. And what a terrifying thought it is to still miss you after a year or two or five or ten. What a terrifying thought it is to keep moving forward without ever finding the strength  to move on from...
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Lucky

There’s a saying health is a luxury only the sick can see. And just like that, how lucky you are is only seen to the one who loved you but never received the love in return. 
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Do it.

I think this is it. I think this is finally it. Do it. The wall we built— so cracked, it’s barely standing and you get to throw the final strike. Do it. Let this be the end of it. Tear down the wall I plastered with my sweat, my blood, my devotion, my denial, everything I was, everything I had left. Tear down the wall that held every hope, every what-if, every should’ve, would’ve, could’ve. Throw one final blow, and that’s it. Let the bricks rain down on my body. Let them break my jaw, crush my spine, fracture my ribs for I am only— a small price you have to pay. A collateral damage too insignificant to notice. Break me until each neuron in my body stops screaming your name. Make me feel nothing. Turn me into nothing. And maybe, by then, you will be nothing too. Or so I wish.
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How It Feels to Lose Someone

If someone had been gone this long the authorities will have presumed them dead. So I threw you a funeral. The kind with  no casket and  no body. No sympathies, no condolences, no simple white lilies. No one’s wearing black, no one’s lighting candle. A devastation only I can feel. Although sometimes I do wish you were dead. So I could slice this sadness like a cake  and share the pieces  with someone else. Perhaps with your mother, or your sister, or some stranger across the street who’s heard good things about you. The day you died, I wish I could mark it. Carve it into a tree, scribble it on a wall, let the grief settle somewhere that isn’t always me. But I can’t. You’re still breathing somewhere— whole, content,  and perhaps fulfilled. And sometimes it feels unfair but other times it feels deserved. For all the strings in the past— that I cut without blinking, I’ve finally learned what it feels like to lose someone.
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