After you died

 After you died, the world did not become empty all at once. First, it simply seemed to lose its sound.

People still talked. Doors still opened and closed. The kettle still whistled in the kitchen. My phone still lit up with messages. Everything around me kept moving as if life had continued normally, but inside me there was suddenly a place untouched by any of it. No voices reached it. No light. No sense of time.

People call that absence.

But the word feels far too small.

Absence is when someone is missing from the dinner table. What disappeared here was not just a person. An entire part of my life vanished with you. Part of my air. Part of my future. The space where you once existed became so enormous that sometimes I am afraid to even approach it in my thoughts.

I tried to survive carefully.

I avoided memories.

I stopped listening to songs we used to play together in the car.

I stopped walking down the street where you always reached for my hand.

I avoided looking at your coffee mug, the one I still cannot bring myself to move.

But grief does not disappear just because you walk around it.

It waits.

Today, for the first time, I went back to the place where we used to spend our afternoons together. Everything looked the same: the bench, the trees, the smell of wet leaves after rain, the cold air settling in quietly around me.

But without you, the place felt different.

Like someone had left the stage behind but stolen the entire story.

I do not want to forget you.

I do not want pain to erase your face, your laugh, the warmth of your voice.

I just want to learn how to step into these memories without falling apart every single time.

I want the emptiness to stop feeling like a cliff one day and become something quieter — a place where I can finally feel grateful that you existed at all.

Today, I still cried.

But I went there anyway.

And maybe that was my first real step through grief.