A Slow

Grief begins as a tight knot just under my ribs.
I keep touching the spot
like checking a pocket
where something valuable used to live.

No manual.
Just the day spilling forward
while I lag a half-step behind,
hands open, catching air.

People ask how I’m doing;
my answer changes mid-sentence.


Language slips.
Some days I’m a closed window,
other days a drafty doorframe.

Absence isn’t blank;
it hums, a low persistent thrum
in the floorboards of the body.


I walk softer now,
as though I might wake whatever is gone.

I write to the beyond
without mailing anything:
scraps in a notebook,
ink drifting between apology
and simple hello.


The page listens better than my mouth does.

I thought mending would be like pulling out a splinter,
quick relief, tidy ending.
Instead it’s drizzle, start‑stop,
a thousand minor recalibrations:
breathing, eating, remembering to laugh
without feeling disloyal.

Here’s the turn.


Not a cure.
A subtle permission.
I stop measuring distance from the day you left
and start noticing new contours:
strength growing like moss on the inner walls (slow, patient),
different colors in ordinary minutes,
the way kindness from strangers lands deeper.

Loss hasn’t shrunk.
I’ve stretched.
Space inside me rearranged
so sorrow can sit


without smothering every bright fragment.

I carry what remains
not as an anchor
but as a quiet metronome,
guiding tempo, not dictating melody.

There are moments now
I forget to brace for impact.
Moments I laugh first,
remember second,
and do not feel like I have betrayed anything sacred.

By night I still reach out sometimes, reflex.
By morning I’m a fraction lighter,
threading ordinary tasks
with a kind of soft courage
I never asked for
yet keep.

If this is recovery,
it is simply this:
continuing,
while letting love stay present
in a form that no longer answers back,
yet somehow helps me answer myself.