My grief is loud

 I cried so much I died so much.

Loss strips you down. You’re not who you were before it. You can’t go back. There’s no before and after, just the ache of what will never be again.

Sometimes grief is so loud it rings in your ears. Sometimes it’s quiet, like a dull pressure on your chest that never lifts. I’ve walked through rooms full of people and still felt completely alone, haunted by absence. You try to smile. Try to be okay. Try to answer the phone. Try to show up. But your heart is somewhere else, stuck in a moment that keeps replaying, a moment you wish you could rewrite.

There were nights I wept into my pillow until my face was raw, my body empty, my soul threadbare. I wailed. I curled up in the dark. I forgot to eat. I hated the sun for rising when my world had ended. I died in little ways.

But somehow grief becomes a kind of companion. It stops screaming and starts whispering. You begin to carry it, rather than be crushed by it. You learn the language of remembering. You light a candle. You speak their name. You laugh at something they would’ve found funny and cry in the same breath.

You start to move again, awkward and broken, but forward. Not because you’re over it. You’ll never be over it. You just grow around it. And maybe, just maybe, that pain opens something in you. A tenderness. A depth. A knowing that love and loss are woven together, and to have felt one so deeply is proof you were alive.

I cried so much I died so much. And yet, I’m still here. Different, softer maybe. But still here.

 ~Shanti Freedom Das