I don’t know how to write about grief.

The day started off normally. Productive, even. I was writing. I was working. I was functioning.

Sudden, unexpected, absolutely devastating personal loss.

I didn’t have time to prepare. Or maybe I did, and the denial was too strong. You know that everything alive, now, will someday die. You, too, will die. Everyone you love will die. But that doesn’t make watching it happen in real time any easier.

You read about other people’s experiences, about looking for someone who isn’t there anymore. It doesn’t make sense until it does.

It’s taken me a week to get off the couch, but the siren song of rotting in my own despair never stops lilting through the now-empty room. I didn’t know it could be this quiet in here, never noticed how much I relied on someone else to fill the void that was my life before.

I’ve started dabbling again, slowly. I know the words will come, eventually, but my God, in the meantime: it hurts. It hurts. I did not want this reminder that so much of what I have to say is tied, like the moon to the tide, to the constant ebb and flow of emotion. The sea is glass still, now, on the surface; underneath is a hurricane that cannot abate.

I can’t stop moving, or I might stop forever.

BH ❤