There comes a quieter kind of grief...
not the kind that wears a name,
not the kind that can be buried
or spoken of in past tense.
This one moves in slowly,
rearranging the furniture of your being
until you no longer recognise
the rooms you once called yourself.
You wake,
and something essential is missing...
not gone in a single moment,
but worn away
like a shoreline that never noticed
the sea was taking it.
You search for yourself
in old habits,
in the music you used to love,
in the mirror...
but the reflection feels like an actor
who studied your face
and forgot your soul.
There is a peculiar silence
where your voice used to live.
Decisions echo longer now,
as if waiting for someone else
to answer.
And who were you,
before the quiet unraveling?
Before the compromises,
the small abandonments,
the thousand moments
you chose survival over truth?
Grief, here, has no ritual.
No one brings flowers
for the person still breathing
but no longer fully there.
So you mourn in fragments...
in the way you linger too long
over memories that feel borrowed,
in the ache of almost-recognition
when a thought flickers
that might have once been yours.
But even here...
in this hollowed-out space...
there is something stubborn
that refuses to vanish.
Not the old self.
Not untouched, not whole.
But a quiet ember
beneath the ruin,
waiting...not to restore,
but to become.
And perhaps
this is the cruel mercy of it:
you cannot go back
to who you were,
only forward
into someone you do not yet know...
someone shaped
not by what was lost,
but by what remained
when everything else fell away.