Publisher’s note: Some stories aren’t about answers. This is one of them.
I don’t think about her death first. That’s what I didn’t expect.
It’s her smile.
That big, effortless smile that showed up before anything else did. The kind that didn’t ask for attention but took it anyway.
And her laugh. The kind that filled a room without trying.
That’s what hits me first.
For a second, it feels like she’s still here. Like nothing has changed.
And then it all comes crashing in behind it.
There’s a house I pass sometimes, and I’ve started to dread that stretch of road more than I want to admit. Because every time I drive by, it’s the same thing.
Her smile. Her laugh.
Then the weight.
It doesn’t ease in. It doesn’t give me time to prepare.
It just hits.
There’s a physical kind of grief that people don’t talk about enough. The kind that makes your chest tighten, your stomach turn, your hands feel like they don’t belong to you for a moment.
That’s what it feels like.
And it doesn’t get easier just because I understand it.
I told myself I walked away because I was hurt. And I was.
There were things I couldn’t carry anymore. Things that sat heavy enough that distance felt like the only way to breathe.
So I created space.
What I didn’t know was that sometimes space doesn’t stay temporary.
Sometimes it becomes permanent.
And there’s no way to go back and fix what you thought you had time to fix.
That’s the part that stays with me.
Not because I think I could have changed what happened. Not because I had any control over how her story ended.
But because I left without knowing it was the last version of us I would ever get.
I think about her children.
I think about the kind of loss that doesn’t just echo, it reshapes everything.
And it breaks something in me every time.
There’s a guilt that lives in quiet places. It doesn’t scream. It doesn’t demand attention.
It just stays.
A constant weight that shows up in the middle of ordinary moments.
I’ve tried to move forward.
I’ve sat across from someone else, had the conversations, gone through the motions of what moving on is supposed to look like.
And it felt like nothing.
Not because they did anything wrong. But because a part of me is still somewhere else.
Still standing in a place that no longer exists, trying to make sense of something that doesn’t have an answer.
I’m starting to understand that cutting people out of your life isn’t always simple.
Sometimes it’s necessary. Sometimes it’s the only way to protect yourself.
But it doesn’t come without consequence.
It doesn’t mean you stop caring. It doesn’t mean the story just ends clean.
Sometimes it means you carry both things at once.
The truth that you needed to leave. And the weight of never getting to come back.
I don’t have a clean ending for this.
I don’t have a lesson tied up in a bow.
I just know this though; the first thing I remember isn’t that she’s gone. It’s that she was here.
And maybe, for now, that has to be enough.
