Buried;
When my father got sick,
the world narrowed
to hospital rooms,
to hope held together with shaking hands,
to the desperate belief
that love could bargain with death.
I became someone built from fear.
From fight.
From prayers whispered into the dark
that maybe we could buy more time.
And if we couldn’t—
maybe I could still give him
the things he wanted to see
before he left this world.
His daughter in white.
A grandchild in his arms.
A life that looked safe.
A life that looked right.
I remember the relief in his eyes
when I brought a man home.
The quiet gratitude.
The way he believed
I had finally outgrown
what he thought was only a phase.
But my father and I
were never simple.
Love between us
was tangled with expectation,
with distance,
with all the things
neither of us knew how to say.
So when he died,
everything I had been building toward
collapsed beside him.
None of it felt urgent anymore.
None of it felt real.
Because somewhere along the way
I realised
I had not been living for myself.
It felt like a star folding inward,
slowly, silently,
gravity crushing everything at its centre.
But the supernova came later—
after the funeral.
After the flowers wilted.
After the last thing I could ever do for him
was done.
Even now,
grief feels unreal in my memory.
Like smoke I can almost hold
before it slips through my fingers.
I wanted to remember everything.
Instead, what remains
is the phone call from Mum
and the ambulance driver’s voice
burned permanently into my chest.
And afterwards,
people expected life to continue.
But how do you return to normal
when you no longer recognise yourself?
Every room held reminders.
Every silence sounded like failure.
I felt as though I was surviving only at the surface,
smiling carefully
while underneath
I paddled furiously
just trying not to drown.
I carried guilt like a second skeleton.
Because I wanted him to stay alive
even when I knew he was suffering.
Because I could not bear losing him.
Because I never gave him
the life he wanted to see for me.
No wedding.
No grandchild.
No version of me
that fit neatly inside his hopes.
And honestly,
it felt like I had spent my whole life
failing him somehow.
So I became reckless.
Careless with my body.
Impulsive with my life.
Because danger was easier than grief.
Because numbness was easier than truth.
And the truth was this:
I had been burying myself alive
for years.
Suppressing parts of who I was
until I no longer knew
where performance ended
and I began.
When I finally let myself speak it—
polyamorous,
whole,
real—
it felt like breathing
after years underwater.
Freedom can feel holy
the first time you touch it.
Until you are asked
to abandon it again.
Because the person who stood beside me
through the worst years of my life,
the person who loved me
through grief and ruin and survival,
wanted a future
I no longer recognised as mine.
Everything he wanted
was built around the version of me
I had once promised to become.
The version shaped by fear.
By obligation.
By my father’s dying wishes
echoing louder than my own voice.
But after my father died,
those promises died too.
Not because I stopped loving him.
Not because he wasn’t enough.
But because I could no longer force myself
into a life that no longer fit.
And that was the cruelest part of all.
Because he loved me honestly.
And I knew that if I stayed,
I would slowly destroy us both.
So I let him go.
Not to punish him.
Not because he failed me.
But because I needed to free him
from the person I was trying to become for everyone else.
The other night he told me
he dreamed I said
we were only together
because it was comfortable.
But comfort
does not feel like this.
Comfort does not split you in two.
Does not make you grieve the future
while still loving the person standing in front of you.
Comfort does not ask you
to break your own heart
just so someone else
has the chance to find
a life that truly fits them too.
M.D
