Not from the cold. From the weight of it. Because this wasn’t just grief. It was guilt. The guilt of being here when she was gone. Of still writing when she had so much left to say. Of waking up every morning, drinking coffee, breathing—like nothing had shattered me.
I uncapped my pen and let it bleed into the fibers, and pressed my palm to the page so the wind couldn’t steal it, the way everything else had been stolen.
And I wrote.
I carved my name into the hollow of my chest
and woke up with someone else’s ribs.
They slip like knives when I breathe.
Blood tastes like the last sentence of a book I can’t finish.
Grief sits on me like a stone with teeth
it chews, through tendon and sense.
I walk the rooms and collect the small accusations:
a chipped mug, a sweater that still holds her heat,
the slow, impossible echo of a laugh that taught me how to live.
Tonight the ocean comes up my throat.
Water fills my mouth and I am learning how to swallow the ocean.
Each inhale is a fist. Each exhale is sand slipping through a cracked hourglass.
I am drowning on dry land.
My hands are open and useless—splayed as if to catch something that will not fall.
They smell of salt and old coffee and the sharp sting of absence.
The wound is a compass; it points to everything I’ve lost.
I follow it and find only the same empty room, over and over.
I am a butchered thing: seams undone, stuffing spilling out
memories like bone fragments that grind when I move.
People pass with soft voices and soft solutions, and I want to scream that there are no stitches for this,
that sympathy is a bandage you peel off to find the wound raw and hungrier.
Sometimes the thought comes like a white moth—patient, painless?—
a small mercy with polite hands, whispering of final quiet.
It is not dramatic. It is not holy. It is a tiny, logical plan that smells like clean rooms and no alarms.
That it arrives calm terrifies me more than the thunder.
I map my days by what I can carry and what drops:
today a fork, yesterday a photograph, last week a promise I made to myself and broke.
