Today it feels like grief is lodged in my throat—thick and heavy, like a scream that never made it out, a sob that never had room to finish. I can’t swallow it down, and I can’t let it go. It just sits there, pulsing like a second heartbeat, tight and sharp and impossible to ignore.
Sometimes the day he died comes back to me like a slap in the face. No warning. No soft lead-in. Just bam—right there again. The panic crashes in first, like a rogue wave pulling me under. Then the fear—God, the fear—wraps around my chest like iron bands. I remember the calls I had to make, the way my hands shook dialing the numbers, the way my voice cracked trying to say the words that I didn’t even understand myself.
But there’s one moment I’ll never outrun: that exact second when I realized what was happening. When my brain caught up to what my body already knew. I screamed—a raw, broken sound I didn’t recognize as my own. And even now, on days like this, I can still hear it echoing inside me.
Today, it all came back. And I curled into myself, knees pulled in tight, arms wrapped around a heart that doesn’t beat the same anymore. I sobbed, gasping for air like I was drowning in it. Like it was that day. All over again. As if no time had passed at all.
Grief does this. It replays the worst scene of your life without permission. Like a cruel director yelling “Take it from the top!” and hitting rewind. The worst part is how real it feels—how present. Like it’s not just memory but muscle and breath and bone.
Please… make it stop.
Please… help me.
Because I don’t know how many more times I can survive the first day.