Grief is a kingdom you never ask to rule.
A place with no stars, no dawn to break.
Endless night.
A place where echoes live longer than voices,
where shadows wear the faces you’ve lost—
but never quite get them right.

It crowns you in silence,
wraps its cloak around your ribs,
tightens until your breath comes in fractured whispers.

I thought I was ready.
I told myself time was mercy—
that knowing would soften the blow.
But grief doesn’t strike like lightning.
It seeps in slowly, like poison in your veins,
until one day you’re gasping,
and you don’t even remember what air felt like.

I try to remember her laugh—
but it’s like chasing smoke.
Somewhere in my mind,
her smile is fading at the edges.
Her voice, just a ghost of a ghost.

I keep pictures tucked away in drawers.
I can’t look at them for too long.
Each glance is a wound,
each memory a blade turning slow beneath my ribs.
But without them, she slips further from me.
I am caught between needing to remember
and not being able to survive it.

How cruel it is—
to lose her twice.
Once to death, and again to time.

My son was born after she left.
A few fractured weeks between his first breath
and the silence she became.
His due date was her birthday.
As if the universe thought irony was a kindness.

Since I was 18,
I have been carving out a life with trembling hands,
mistaking silence for strength,
mistaking independence for survival.
But I was wrong.

Strength is standing in the ruin
and naming every piece.
It is saying:
This hurt.
This still hurts.
It is learning to breathe in the dark.

They don’t tell you how grief is a thief—
how it steals the good with the bad.
How every sweet memory is chased by regret.
How every second of love feels borrowed.
How guilt hangs on your shoulders like a cloak
you can’t remove.

I should have stayed longer.
I should have loved louder.
I should have grown up faster,
instead of pretending I had all the time in the world.

I still don’t know how to carry this.
Most days, I bury it beneath busy hands and silence.
But it always finds me—
in the quiet, in the stillness,
in the moments when her name rises to my lips
but never makes it past my teeth.

Grief is a kingdom,
and I am its prisoner.
There are no windows, no keys, no doors.
Only the ghosts of what could have been
and the weight of everything I didn’t say.

And yet somehow,
even in this shadowland,
I am still searching for light.