Read more poetry by Britt Wolfe
There was a time
when a bad day began
with coffee that tasted wrong,
a toe caught against the furniture,
a computer refusing to cooperate
with the simplest of requests.
The internet would disappear,
the words would not arrange themselves,
and some small, unremarkable thing
would become the final indignity
in a long procession
of minor inconveniences.
And how easily
the hours were condemned.
How readily the words
what a terrible day
were offered to the universe,
as though the universe
had been particularly unkind.
But there was always tomorrow.
The coffee could be remade.
The internet would return.
The words would eventually come,
and even the most stubborn machine
would be forgiven
for its little rebellion.
Nothing was truly lost
except a few hours
and the patience
to endure them.
How extraordinary,
to have once believed
that was suffering.
To have lived so comfortably
inside the certainty
of continuation
that an inconvenience
could masquerade as tragedy.
And then,
one ordinary day,
something ends.
Not pauses.
Not falters.
Not waits
for a better morning.
Ends.
And suddenly,
the world reveals
a cruelty so complete
that even time
cannot undo it.
There is no restarting.
No rearranging.
No tomorrow
in which everything
might be put right.
Only the terrible permanence
of a moment
that divides a lifetime
into everything before
and everything after.
And the date,
once innocent
in its place upon the calendar,
becomes something else entirely.
An anniversary
that no longer belongs
to celebration,
but to absence.
A day the world
will continue to live through,
year after year,
while somewhere
a heart remembers
the precise moment
it learned
that forever
could be taken away.
And perhaps
that is the strangest grief of all:
that the coffee
will still taste wrong sometimes,
the internet will still fail,
the words will still refuse to come,
and life will go on
offering its small frustrations
as though nothing
has changed.
But everything has.
Because once,
a bad day
was a collection
of things gone wrong.
And now,
a bad day
is the one
on which a life
ran out of tomorrows.
The day
that someone died.
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Poetry by Britt Wolfe:
There was a time when a bad day meant spilled coffee, uncooperative technology, and a thousand little frustrations that felt enormous in the moment. But what happens when an ordinary day becomes the one that changes everything? What a Bad Day Used to Be is a heartbreaking reflection on the innocence of everyday inconveniences, the devastating permanence of loss, and the moment our understanding of suffering changes forever. It explores how a date that once held the promise of another tomorrow can become an anniversary of absence, and how the world continues with all its trivial irritations while everything that matters has irrevocably changed. For anyone who has ever wished that a bad day could be something small again. 💚