There comes a moment—quiet, unceremonious, unmarked—when the person you loved, the person you tethered your life to, stops being who they were and becomes someone else entirely, someone harder, more distant, a stranger occupying the same body, breathing the same air, wearing the same clothes, but not looking at you the same way, not speaking in that tone that used to pull you in like gravity. And you try, at first, to ignore it, to pretend it’s fatigue or stress or something chemical, something repairable, reversible. You try to will him back into the person you fell in love with. But then you realize he’s gone. Not dead. Just gone. And there's nothing you can do. No apology, no touch, no cry in the middle of the night will resurrect him.
So you mourn. Not the way you mourn the dead. No one sends flowers. No one visits. No one tells you they’re sorry.
Eventually, you accept the most difficult truth: he is still alive, but he is no longer here.
You become fluent in restraint. You learn to keep your sadness contained in respectable proportions. And yet, it spills- into mornings, into coffee spoons, into phone calls you don’t return. You perform functionality, but inside, something is collapsing.
You realize the breaking doesn't stop. It finds new corners of you to shatter. It digs deeper. It makes room for more pain in places you thought had already been hollowed out. And this is when the past starts to rise, not as a memory, but as a presence, thick and heavy and suffocating. You find yourself in that same room—your mother’s room—years ago, where she cried into her pillow as if silence would keep you from hearing, as if the walls weren’t paper-thin, as if children don’t always know.
And now you are her. Crying into the same silence. Except there’s no child on the other side of the door. There’s just you. And the you that once was. The child that never left. The child who learned early that love could vanish without notice. That people could stay and still abandon you. That pain could be inherited like old furniture—passed down, room to room, woman to woman, until no one remembers where it began.
People tell you time heals. They say it with such confidence, as if time were a doctor, a god, a parent. But you know better. You know time doesn’t heal; it accumulates. It stacks the pain until it becomes indistinguishable from the rest of you. Until you forget what it was like to live without the weight of it.
You live inside them. You decorate them. You fold laundry in them. You raise children in them. You tell yourself you are functioning. But really, you're just surviving grief on a loop.
And in your most honest moments, when no one's looking, you admit it—not aloud, not even in writing, but somewhere behind the ribs: you are still that helpless girl. You never stopped being her. You only got taller.