here's a grief no one talks about - the kind where the person you're mourning is still breathing.
Still walking around
laughing in rooms you'll never be invited into.
I lost you slowly.
Not to death, but to a choice -
one you made over and over again until it wasn't a choice anymore, just who you became.
You picked her.
Her voice over mine.
Her comfort over my childhood.
Her hands that never learned softness
against the daughter who only ever wanted yours.
And I learned, early, how to make myself smaller in the hopes you'd notice the space I left behind.
I learned how to swallow words like "Dad, why don't you fight for me?" until they tasted like nothing…
And when the world became too heavy, when the ghosts of my past clawed at my skin, I made myself bleed quietly in the corners of rooms you never thought to check.
I swallowed pills like prayers,
chased highs like they could rewrite the past, and still, you never noticed.
I grieve the father I-imagined when I was too young to know better.
The one who would have stayed.
The one who would have looked at me like I was something worth keeping.
Sometime I wish you had died
Because grief makes more sense when there's a funeral, when there's a body to bury, when love can sit at a graveside and say its goodbyes.
But there is no grave, just silence.
Just the knowledge that you are somewhere, living a life that does not include me.
You taught me what it means to be replaceable.
To watch a man
who held your tiny body once, turn away
because someone else made him cho
You chose her.
I tried to convince myself that wasn't the end - but it was.
Maybe not all at once, but in a thousand quiet ways
And the worst part is - I still miss you.
I still wonder if you think of me when the house is too quiet and she's not looking.
I wonder if my name still tastes like guilt when it crosses your mind
now you're just a stranger I share a last name with, a ghost
haunting the places in me that still ache for a father
I will never have.