I know what awaits me
when you leave.
The silence won’t rush in—
it will seep, slow and patient,
curling into the corners,
pooling like shadowed water,
filling every crack until I drown in its weight.

I know the sun will rise,
but its light will cut like glass,
sharp and empty.
It will pour through the windows,
but it won’t touch me.
Without you, even the brightest day
will feel dim,
its warmth a hollow imitation
of what it once was.

I’ll move,
because I must.
One step, then another,
a quiet rhythm of survival.
Breathe in.
Breathe out.
But every step will feel like walking through water,
every breath heavy with the weight
of all that is missing.

Tears will stay close,
not loud or demanding,
but constant,
like rain against a window—
soft, relentless,
reminding me of the cracks
I cannot repair.
I know the sound of breaking too well,
the quiet splitting of a heart
losing its fight against the weight of memory.

The nights will be longer than the days.
Sleep will slip away,
twisting out of my grasp like smoke.
The darkness will not comfort me;
it will tighten around my ribs,
chains of thought pulling me deeper,
until I am no longer sure
what is real
and what is memory.

They’ll tell me what to do.
Take a walk.
Pick up a hobby.
Distract yourself.
But every step will echo with what I’ve lost,
and every distraction
will feel like a futile attempt
to fill a void too deep for anything to reach.

I won’t write to you.
I won’t call.
I’ll try not to think of you.
But how do I grieve someone
who was never truly mine,
yet feels like the only thing
I’ve ever lost?

“Time heals all wounds,”
I’ve whispered this to others,
as if believing it myself
might make it true.
But I know better now.
Time doesn’t heal—it stretches, it loops, it folds.
It teaches you to carry the weight,
not to lessen it.
The burden remains,
constant as the ticking
of a clock in an empty room.

I know the ways to quiet the ache.
The small doses of forgetting,
the numbing blur of a world
too distant to hurt.
I know how to make the pain
feel less real,
but I also know
it waits for me in the quiet,
unchanged,
unmoved.

I know what awaits me
when you go.
I’ll breathe.
I’ll eat.
I’ll sleep.
The days will pass,
because they must.
But what if time
is not the cure they promised?

I don’t want to return—
back to the darkness,
back to the place
where everything broke.
But I feel it pulling at me already,
a quiet, unrelenting gravity.

And yet, I know.
The loss will settle into me,
a quiet shadow that never leaves,
a scar etched too deep to fade.
Because loss has always been my quiet teacher,
its lessons carved deep,
its weight the only thing I know how to carry.