30 Days of Radical Honesty Journalling Challenge – Day 17: What Is The Grief I Carry That No One Sees?

I carry things.

I carry them the way others carry heirlooms or scars—tucked gently but constantly against my chest. I carry memories, moments, conversations, silences, the weight of choices I made with the best of intentions and the ache of those I wish I could rewrite. I am always reflecting, always looking back. I study the past like it holds a map to who I am becoming.

And I like this about myself.

I like that I want to grow, that I examine and stretch and refine. That I ask myself again and again, was I kind? did I listen? did I do the right thing? But the cost of that is this: I also carry grief. Deep, quiet, private grief. The kind that settles into your muscles and never quite leaves.

There’s one grief I carry that most people don’t see—the loss of my connection to my extended family in Ontario.

It’s not dramatic or fractured by anger. It’s just… time. Distance. Life. It’s the soft erosion of what once was sacred, beautiful, simple. I used to go every summer. I lived for it. The cottage weekends. Swimming in the lake until my fingers puckered. Barefoot walks down gravel roads to The Barn. Renting movies and staying up too late. I miss those small, glittering joys.

I miss getting in trouble for building a worm castle with my cousins, emptying out the just-purchased bait to house our squirmy kingdom. I miss dumping out tackle boxes so we could catch fish in them—not for food, but for friendship. We tried to bring them home as pets.

I miss looking for frogs and the laughter that echoed through the heat. I miss piling into the back bedroom with so many cousins, all of us sticking to the sheets in the relentless, damp press of an Ontario summer.

Time is such a strange thing. I write poems about it—about how it expands and stretches and slips through your fingers, leaving behind only memories and maybe a photograph, maybe a scent. Our trips to Ontario are like that now. A living scrapbook I revisit in my mind when the world goes still.

Now I am the adult. And I miss the adults. So many of them have passed. Their absence aches in ways I didn’t anticipate. I never truly got to say goodbye. I hope they know how much their presence meant to me. I hope they know how often I think of them. That their legacy lingers in the humid hush of midsummer, in the sound of lakewater lapping against dockwood, in the scent of perfumed bath beads and mosquito spray and sun-warmed plastic mingled with chlorine.

There are people from those summers who are still here. Family I love and miss. People I still hold close in my heart, even if the geography and seasons have stretched the space between us. I don’t know how to reconnect. I don’t know if the magic of childhood can ever be recaptured.

But I hope they know.

I hope they know that on hot summer days, when I walk into an air-conditioned room, I am suddenly there again. I’m in the basement, clacking around in their mom’s old high heels, building troll houses, dreaming about snacks from IGA. And I feel it. All of it. The ache. The joy. The impossible beauty of what once was.

This is the grief I carry that no one can see.

And I carry it with love.

Peace, Love, and Inspiration,
~Britt Wolfe💚