Learning to Breathe

I didn’t know how to stand

after the world tilted—

how to hold a cup,

or my own name

without spilling something sacred.

They don’t tell you

that absence has texture—

not emptiness,

but a weight with memory,

a shape that presses

into your bones

like the curve of a long-lost hand.

People pass by

still chewing daylight,

still laughing at nothing,

while I’m left

learning how to carry

what has no edge,

no instructions,

just silence

with teeth.

I thought healing would arrive

like sunrise—

swift and golden,

cleansing.

But it crawled instead.

It itched.

It cracked

every old certainty

until I stopped

expecting to feel like myself

and started

listening

for the self that waits

beyond the ache.

Not in forgetting,

but in allowing

grief to be

a strange kind of compass.

It doesn’t point home.

It points forward.

But crookedly.

And only

when I’m still enough

to notice

the way breath stumbles

then steadies.

I have begun

folding the ache into me—

like fabric worn soft

by too many washes.

It doesn’t fit.

But I wear it

anyway.

And somehow,

there’s light again.

Not above.

But within—

in all the broken spaces

where love still echoes,

faint

but enough.

Postscript:

This free verse explores the raw terrain of grief and how its quiet permanence slowly reshapes identity. A poem about holding sorrow, not escaping it—and somehow growing through what remains