The Smaller Griefs

Most people
think grief
arrives carrying flowers.

Wearing black.

Speaking in hushed voices.

They think
it announces itself
before it enters the room.

But grief
has always been
far less interested
in ceremony.

It lives
inside smaller things.

The last time
someone calls you
by a nickname
they’ll never use again.

The day
your child
stops reaching
for your hand
without either of you
noticing
it was the last time.

The friendship
that doesn’t end
so much
as slowly
forget
to continue.

The house
that still exists,
only now
someone else
knows
where the spoons are.

The dream
you stop mentioning
because you’ve quietly
accepted
it belongs
to a different version
of your life.

Grief
is remarkably
unconcerned
with whether the world
thinks
your loss
is important enough.

It mourns
what mattered.

Nothing more.

Nothing less.

Sometimes
it is the person
you never became.

Sometimes
it is the certainty
you once carried
through the world
before experience
asked you
to put it down.

Sometimes
it is your own face
looking back
from an old photograph,
and realizing
you are missing
someone
who is still
technically
you.

Sometimes
it is happiness.

Not because
it ended.

Because you finally
understood
while it was happening
that it would.

There is grief
in children growing.
In parents aging.
In leaving.
In staying.
In becoming.
In healing.

No one tells you
that even healing
has casualties.

Every version
of yourself
that survives
requires another
to quietly
step aside.

Perhaps
that is why
our hearts
become so crowded.

They are not
filled only
with the people
we have loved.

They are filled
with places,
seasons,
possibilities,
beliefs,
futures,
identities
and all the lives
we have lived
for a while
before life
asked us
to become
someone else.

Maybe
grief
has never belonged
only to death.

Maybe
it belongs
to every moment
we discover
that nothing,
no matter
how beautiful,
gets to remain
exactly
as it was.

And maybe
that isn’t
a failure
of living.

Maybe
it is the receipt
love leaves behind.

Proof
that something
was here.

That it mattered.

That for one brief,
impossible moment,
we got to call it
ours.