​
I thought it would fade by now,
the way most things are supposed to.
But it doesn’t fade.
It just changes where it stands.
Some days it’s in the quiet before I speak,
like my voice has to pass through it first
and decides not to.
Some days it’s in familiar places,
not because they belong to it,
but because I do.
I keep walking through life
as if forward is the direction,
but something in me keeps returning
without asking permission.
I don’t call it grief at first.
Grief sounds too final for something
that keeps repeating itself.
It feels more like waiting
for something that already left
but forgot to tell me it was done.
There are moments I almost forget,
and those are the worst moments,
because they feel like loss arriving late
to collect what it never took.
I try to name it,
but names make things smaller,
and this doesn’t get smaller
no matter how often I look away.
It comes back in fragments,
not memories exactly,
more like echoes that learned my shape
and decided to stay near it.
I tell myself it doesn’t matter anymore.
That life continues anyway.
That people move on.
And I do move.
I function.
I live in the shape of “after.”
But something in that word never closes.
After what?
That’s the question it keeps asking
without ever needing an answer.
Because even the question itself
has learned how to linger.
And I think that’s what it is,
not an ending,
not a beginning,
just something that keeps happening softly
in the places I don’t look directly at.
I don’t go back anymore.
But it still comes forward.
Quietly.
Like it never left at all.