The Most Violent Thing Of All
Read more poetry by Britt Wolfe
It is not the sudden things
that undo us.
Not the blade.
Not the blast.
Not the single, spectacular moment
that breaks cleanly
and lets the body collapse honestly
into aftermath.
The most violent thing of all
never finishes its work.
It stays.
It moves through rooms
long after the voices have gone quiet.
It sits beside empty chairs.
It presses its thumb
into the softest parts of memory
until even remembering hurts.
Time does not strike.
It wears.
It worries at the edges of what we love
until closeness thins
into distance,
and distance stretches
into absence
so gradual
we do not know the moment
we crossed into forever.
It teaches us the cruelty
of watching.
Watching strength soften.
Watching faces rearrange themselves
around loss.
Watching love survive
long enough
to become grief.
Time does not take everything at once.
That would be mercy.
It takes in pieces—
a voice lowered,
a step slowed,
a name spoken
with more effort than before.
It leaves enough intact
to ache.
Enough memory
to make longing permanent.
Enough past
to keep comparing
what is
to what was
until comparison becomes a wound
that never closes.
This is its genius.
It allows attachment
to outlive its object.
So we carry love
with nowhere to place it.
We carry tenderness
that has lost its home.
We carry days
that will never arrive again
like stones in our chests.
Time dismantles us
while insisting we continue.
It demands functioning
after devastation.
It asks us to survive
what it has methodically erased.
And the grief—
the real grief—
is not loud.
It is a pit.
A weight.
A quiet knowledge
that something essential
has been converted
into irretrievable.
Time does not pause
when we beg it to.
It does not slow
for sorrow.
It moves forward
through funerals,
through anniversaries,
through the moments
when we reach for someone
who is no longer there
and feel the full violence
of the empty air.
This is the most brutal truth:
Time is undefeated.
Every love
is eventually asked
to prove how much it can endure
after the person,
the place,
the life
it was built around
is gone.
And still—
time keeps going.
Past our resistance.
Past our prayers.
Past the places where our hearts
have collapsed inward
and learned how to beat again
around a hollow.
Until even grief itself
begins to change shape—
not because it is healed,
but because time
has decided
to keep moving.
This is the violence
no one escapes.
The slow, exquisite cruelty
of living long enough
to miss what mattered
with your whole body—
and carrying that absence
forward
as the clock continues
its merciless work.
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