It has been 365 days since I last held your gaze,
a full rotation of the earth since your eyes met mine
in the warm, ordinary light of a day we didn’t know would be our last.
Fifty-two weeks have passed since your arms wrapped around me,
anchoring me in a world that still felt whole.
A year since I stood in your presence
and felt the familiar calm of a shoreline I trusted,
before I knew how quickly even steady tides can turn.
Today the calendar feels like a clock tower tolling in the distance,
each chime announcing the truth I keep trying to outrun:
you’re really not coming home.
Outside, the cold is a living thing.
It winds around the house, slipping beneath the door,
seeping into my bones like a memory I can’t warm away.
The frigid air mirrors the hollow inside me,
a winter I carry, no matter the season.
I’ve felt this day approaching like a storm on the horizon,
dark clouds gathering in the corner of my vision.
Not fear, exactly,
just a quiet, heavy knowing
that grief was circling back for another lap around my heart.
Yesterday my stomach churned like river water stirred by the wind;
I knew it was the anxiety of remembering what I can never relive,
the sound of your laugh in my kitchen,
the way you leaned against the counter,
the conversations we had and the ones we never got to finish.
I won’t get that back.
I won’t get a do-over,
won’t get to guide you through the hard, tangled parts of life that you were still trying to sort through.
That truth sits in my chest like a stone,
heavy, cold, unmoving.
Grief has carved pounds away from me this year,
like a sculptor chiseling at marble,
chips falling, form changing,
not by choice but by force.
I would take every pound back.
I would carry twice my weight,
three times my weight,
if it meant one more sunrise with you on this earth.
I’d trade every possession we own,
every comfort, every convenience,
because none of it matters.
Not in the grand scheme.
Not when measured against you.
What matters is this ache,
this love that still reaches for you
even though my arms come up empty.
What matters is the space you filled
and the silence that followed you home to heaven.
Today hurts.
It’s a sharp, bright kind of hurt,
like stepping into winter light
that blinds and freezes all at once.
But I’m writing it down so the ache has somewhere to go
other than the soft, tired places inside me.
Because I miss you.
And missing you has become its own kind of poetry,
a language made of absence,
spoken in the quiet corners of every single day without you.
