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 after three hundred thirteen days, grief evolves. Grief used to knock 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, leaves 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 kind that comes at s...
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.
When my friend told me he’d rather lose his lover by separation than by death, something finally clicked in me— not everyone knows how it feels to carry grief that has no grave. And it made sense; all the frowns, the sneers, the laughter, for not everyone recognizes this kind of misfortune. And how lucky they are to never have their souls tied to another who slips the knot and walks away. To never love someone with every fiber of their being, every neuron in their body, only to lose them. Every day I bargain in my head over which part of me I’d trade just to have him back. Maybe my left eye, maybe my right hand, maybe my liver, maybe my life. 535 days after he left, I understand why some people end their life over a heartbreak and how some people cannot begin to imagine it.
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