Every room echoed with her ghost. Not the spooky kind, but the kind you felt when you caught a scent that shouldn’t have been there, or when you walked into a room and your gut twisted because your brain, for just a split second, believed she’d be there.
Sitting. Laughing. Breathing.
But she wasn’t.
The silence wasn’t gentle. It was heavy. Filled with everything no one said.
The way my dad looked at me now, like he was searching for something in my face but kept coming up empty, gutted me. Maybe he was looking for her. Maybe he was looking for the version of me that died the day she did.
I wouldn’t blame him if he was.
We barely spoke. What was there to say? Words felt too small, too fragile to carry the weight we were both dragging. So we said nothing.
Yet every lingering silence was louder than any scream I could have set free. Every unsaid word? It cut deeper than any goodbye ever would. Because at least a goodbye was something. A line drawn in the sand. An end.
But these… these unsaid things just hung in the air, decaying slowly, poisoning everything they touched.
I was left asking what was the point. What was the point in living in a world she didn’t exist in? I wasn’t suicidal. Not exactly. I didn’t want to die. I just didn’t know how to live like this.
That was the thing no one told you about grief. It wasn’t just sadness. It was disorientation. It was waking up in a life that no longer fit. It was trying to remember who you were before your world fell apart—and realizing you weren’t that person anymore.
I didn’t know who I was anymore. I just knew I missed her. And I didn’t know how to stop.
That morning was no different. The house was too quiet when I woke up. Not in a peaceful, soft way. Not the kind of quiet people wrote about in novels where sunlight spilled through gauzy curtains and everything smelled like hope.
This was the kind of silence that hurt. It pressed into my skull until my ears rang. It made me feel like the last person alive and the house knew it.
Grief in architectural form. Walls too still. Floors that creaked like old bones. The haunting echo of a life that had been carved out of every corner and was now irrevocably gone.
Just like the house didn’t know what to do without her. Neither did I.
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten. It didn’t matter. Food tasted like ash anyway. Everything did—air, water, life—brittle and scorched, the aftermath of a fire no one bothered to put out.
Time didn’t pass. It bled. Days, nights, mornings were just the same ache in different clothes.
I dragged myself into the bathroom, turned the shower on, brushed my teeth while the water ran. Took a piss. Moved through the motions like some mechanical toy. I couldn’t bring myself to look in the mirror. What was the point? The reflection would lie or worse, it wouldn’t.
Not prepared to see what I’d become, I stepped into the shower.
The water was freezing. It needled into my skin, made my teeth chatter but I didn’t flinch. I didn’t really feel it. I was elsewhere. Lost. A ghost in someone else’s life.
By the time I made it downstairs, Dad wasn’t in the living room like he usually was, staring at nothing. The house felt heavier for it.
The coffee machine sputtered to life on autopilot; the sound too loud in the quiet kitchen. From down the hall, strained voices drifted, seeping through the air from his office.
My feet moved without asking me to. I stopped just outside the door. Anthony’s voice was calm. Controlled. Like he was holding something back.
“David, you need help. You need to talk to someone?—”
“I don’t need anyone,” Dad rasped. “I need Natalie.”
Silence followed in the wake of his words.
“I know,” Anthony said quietly. “But that’s not going to happen.”
The sound my father made after that wasn’t human. It ripped right through me.
The mug slipped from my sweat-slicked fingers. Scalding coffee splashed over my arm, but I didn’t feel a thing. My mind was already somewhere else—drowning in memories that hit like artillery fire.
