The Places Grief Made

A Dedicated Story to A Dear Friend

There is an empty chair in the kitchen that no one moves. A cup, still cracked, still waiting. The dent in the pillow where your head used to rest. The half-worn slippers by the door.

No one touches these things. As if touching them might erase the last places you lived.

The house has learned to carry your absence. It cradles it like a wound that refuses to close, bleeding memory into every breath we take. I wake to silence shaped like you. I sleep beside shadows where your voice used to fall.

People say time stitches these things. They do not tell you that some wounds are too wide, too deep—too tender to scar.

I thought I could keep you by remembering. I thought memory would be enough. But memory is cruel.

It holds your laughter in the corners of my mind, blurred and brittle. It plays your smile in slow motion, warping it until it doesn't look like you anymore. It lets me reach for you in dreams—only to wake with hands curled around nothing.

They say grief is love with nowhere to go. I think it's more than that.

Grief is love with teeth. It gnaws at the walls we build. It howls in the hollow rooms. It claws its name into everything soft left behind.

Still—if you opened the door tomorrow, if you stood there, sheepish and late, if you said you were sorry for the wait—I would forget every lonely minute. I would forgive the silence, the ache, the ruin. I would hand you my broken heart without hesitation.

Because grief may teach you how to live without someone. But it never teaches you how to stop waiting for them to come home.

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