The Shape of What Remains

There are things that happen
and cannot be undone.
Moments that don’t ask for your permission
before they break you.
Realities that do not bend
no matter how softly you beg them to.

Grief is not a process—
it is a condition.
A long, slow corrosion
of the world you thought you lived in.

People will tell you to breathe,
to ground yourself,
to make peace with what is.
As if peace is something you can summon
in the crater left behind
when the worst thing
becomes the only thing.

You do not move on.
You do not heal.
You adapt,
the way a tree splits itself
around rusted metal
and keeps growing crooked.
Still alive, yes—
but never as it was.

The truth is:
some wounds don’t close.
They stay open,
weeping just beneath the surface.
They flare with anniversaries
and objects and faces
that look too much like before.

The consequence is not a season.
It is a state.
It lingers in the room
long after the door has closed,
settling into your lungs
until it feels like breath itself.

There are no silver linings
when the world turns to ash.
Only ash.

And the task—
if there is one—
is not to fix it,
not to rise stronger,
not to call it growth.

The task
is to live anyway.
To make coffee.
To return emails.
To buy soap.
To carry what cannot be reversed
with hands that still shake.

And if you find the strength to laugh,
to love,
to hold joy for a brief, trembling second—
it will not be because the sadness has left.

It will be because you learned
to live with it curled beside you,
a silent, faithful companion.

This is reality.
Not the lesson.
Not the bright side.
Only the terrible,
irreversible
truth—
and the long, slow wading
through what’s left.