What Grief Leaves Behind

What Grief Leaves Behind

— a poem for what was loved, and what still loves

Grief does not arrive loud.

It comes like a quiet rearranging—

chairs moved in rooms

I still walk through every day.

I reach for you

the way muscle remembers light,

the way breath expects air

to answer back.

Some days, loss is sharp—

a clean ache,

a sudden missing

that steals the ground from under language.

Other days, it is soft,

a weight I carry without noticing

until I try to set it down

and realize I don’t know how.

They tell me time heals.

But time does not heal—

it teaches me how to live

with an open place

where love once rested.

And still, love does not leave.

It changes shape.

It becomes memory,

becomes instinct,

becomes the quiet way I pause

before joy,

as if asking permission.

I grieve because I loved.

I grieve because something mattered enough

to change me forever.

And even here—

in the hollow,

in the unanswered—

I am still carrying you forward

in the only way I can:

by continuing

What Remains

— a companion piece from the other side of grief

I did not leave grief behind.

It loosened its grip

when I stopped asking it to go.

One day, without announcement,

I noticed the air felt lighter—

not because the loss was smaller,

but because I had grown around it.

What once hurt to touch

now warms my hands.

Memory no longer cuts—

it steadies.

I can say your name

without bracing myself.

I can smile

and not apologize for it.

Love has learned new language.

It speaks in quiet guidance,

in sudden calm,

in the way I trust myself more

than I used to.

Grief taught me how to stay.

How to keep my heart open

without bleeding out.

I carry you differently now—

not as absence,

but as presence that walks beside me,

unseen,

unlost.

And when joy comes,

I let it in.

Not as betrayal,

but as proof

that love survived

the crossing