#hadashi

It isn't waking up one day, looking around and suddenly everything is different. It's waking up every day, opening your tired eyes and nothing is ever the same again.

Being so angry that they left you because you needed them and why does everyone leave you? There is only an echo of the little boy who dried his own tears and promised the tiny child beside him that mommy and daddy didn't want to leave.

It isn't looking at old photos, seeing smiling faces and feeling the ache of memories that hurt to recall. It's looking at the photos and knowing there won't be memories to make anymore.

Feeling so afraid of making memories without them because you don't want to risk forgetting anything else. Somewhere in the photos that will never be taken a young man laughs, hugging his little brother tightly at a graduation that will now happen without him.

It isn't flowers on a gravestone from a funeral you never got to attend and honoring who a person was with words you weren't there to hear spoken. It's knowing the flowers wilt and stones wear away but the future where that happens was robbed of all the things they left unfinished.

Guilt in knowing you wish it had been you instead so they could have changed the world even though trading places would have hurt them in return. An older man turns one day to his brother to smile as he shows him the creation that will make the world better and they share that moment of elation and triumph, except he won't because his notes and plans were traded for flowers long since wilted.

It isn't packing away the possessions they left behind and wondering when you're going to be able to open that box again to let those items go. It's knowing you will have to open that box a million times and watch that baseball cap age while they cannot.

Wanting to cry because you can never open that box without marking the life stolen in every stitch time frays. And an old man situates a time-worn baseball cap upon the head of a messy haired child with big eyes and a gap-toothed smile just like his father, and tells them it belongs to them now, if not for the truth that instead that cap only grows dust in a box that is finally only opened once a year.

And it isn't the tears, the loneliness, or the sleepless nights where you look down the hall expecting them to appear and ask you what the nightmare was about.

It's living your tears, loneliness, and sleepless nights and learning to face your nightmares on your own so that one day you stop looking down that hallway but you never stop wanting to.

Loss of someone is loss of the part of yourself that they lived within. Grief is knowing that living is harder than dying. But you have to do it anyway.

Not for them, for yourself, but because you don't want to lose the part of you that they believed in even if they're gone. The part you still feel besides you at your best and your worst.

Grief isn't what people tell you it is.