lia

There’s a boy I love, although I shouldn’t, or I’m told I shouldn’t or that I can’t possibly. It’s easy for people to say that I should move on, like there’s a switch somewhere inside of me I’ve just refused to press, but there isn’t, please believe me when I say I have tried seeking it, I’m not sure there’s a stone unturned in me, and there is definitely no switch, there never was, not for love, and not for grief either. They feel like the same system, something heavy and low and rippling under everything, not loud, not chaotic, just constant, like a smog that fills a city scape, until you forget what it looked like before.

There are versions of my life where things went differently, I’m sure of it, small moments where we could have noticed something, said something, turned slightly to the left instead of the right, and in those versions he is fine and I don’t have to think about where that part of me goes, his little girl, the one that fits easily beside him, but that’s not this version, and this one feels quieter in a way that isn’t peace, just absence stretched thin.

Some days it settles into something almost manageable, a heavy inky blue that spreads out and dulls the sharper edges, and there is a kind of relief in that, in the quiet of it, like nothing is actively cutting me open even with the weight of it still carried everywhere I go.

But then, I don’t want to pretend it’s something gentle. I don’t want whimsy or soft edges or the kind of sadness people know how to look at without discomfort. I want the truth of it, ugly and wretched, dirty clothes hanging off the exercise bike, wrappers tucked into the frame of my bed, skin that hasn’t been cared for, the stale, rotting evidence of time passing. I want someone to look at that and not turn away, not try to reframe it into something palatable. I want my grief to be acceptable even when it looks like this.

Because it isn’t soft, it has never been soft. It’s thick, resistant, something you have to move through rather than something that passes through.

Sometimes it feels like trudging through wet sand, dense enough to hold you in place, and other times it feels worse than that, like cement, like something that started out pliable, and then sets whilst I was still inside it, fixing me in place without asking if I was ready. I am not grounded in it, not held safely by it, but weighed down, made still by it.

I don’t think I was made for this. Or maybe I was made wrong. It feels like too much was poured into something not built to carry it, a structural fault, something in me that gives out under the weight and leaves everything spilling over or sinking inward with nowhere to go. There’s a kind of panic in that, in realising there’s no clean way to hold what you’ve been given.

And the thing is that life doesn’t stop to match it. I thought–I expected–chaos, loud and undeniable. But this is it. This is my life as it is happening, and it’s dull in a way I wasn’t prepared for, not dramatic or sharp, just long and quiet and difficult to move through. It isn’t silence the way I thought it would be. It’s a kind of quiet that isn’t quiet at all, more like an ocean holding itself still, something infinite underneath it, and every so often it breaks through just enough to be heard, whispers on a distant roar, find her, find her, but my legs are heavy remember?

And I’ve tried to step outside of it, to let go in ways that are supposed to help, to follow instruction, to soften, to drift, and it almost works for a moment, it feels easy, but it never holds. Something in me stays awake, keeps knocking, small and persistent, like that little matchstick girl I hold behind my eyes, asking not to be ignored.

And there are moments where I think maybe the answer is not to fight it so hard, maybe it would be easier to just let myself sink into it fully, to stop resisting the weight and let it take me under in a controlled way, something closer to rest than struggle, an idea that feels dangerously close to relief.

I don’t believe in anything, not really, not in the way people mean when they talk about faith, but I understand the desire for it. I understand wanting something to take all of this and wash it clean, to make it make sense, to call it forgiven or finished or over. I can picture it, the quiet of a church, the echo of footsteps, the promise of something being lifted off of me, His hands are not the hands I crave though, they’re not the hands I first found safety and dependence in.

I am still here, and nothing has been lifted. The weight is still the same, maybe even more solid now than it was before. It doesn’t rage, it doesn’t soften, it just stays, consistent and unyielding.

And I am living it.

Here are three things that I know are true, although I wish they weren’t:

1. I avoid endings like they’re poisonous.

2. Every death I’ve lived through has taken something from me I’ll never get back.

3. Leaves make dying look easier than it actually is.

Some clarifying notes:

1. When I say “avoid,” I mean eight years of not watching the last season of Friends.

2. When my childhood dog died, I didn’t just lose him. I lost the version of myself that existed beside him.

3. And when I say “easier,” I don’t mean leaves don’t die, only that they do it with more grace than I’ve ever been able to imagine for myself.

I don’t know why endings feel like rehearsals for my own funeral.

I don’t know why the world keeps moving forward when someone I love disappears, why people keep buying milk or answering emails like nothing cracked in half.

It makes grief feel private.

And if it’s private, it feels like maybe it wasn’t allowed to matter.

I’ve tried religion

I’ve tried purpose.

I’ve tried convincing myself death is a doorway, not a brick wall.

But none of it sticks. Something inside me refuses to believe in comfort it can’t touch.

And the worst part?

I’m not scared of dying.

I’m scared of being dead.

Of being the still body in the room.

Of being the one in the box while everyone else breathes without me.

Anyway.

Can I tell you about leaves?

Please?

Let me talk about leaves instead.

People say green leaves turn red in autumn.

But here’s what actually happens, the green doesn’t die.

The tree pulls it back inside itself.

The leaf just…

reveals what was underneath the whole time.

Gold.

Orange.

Red.

Colours it was hiding because survival needed something practical.

And when the leaf falls

brittle, veined, held up to the sun by a child’s hand

it still isn’t finished.

It softens into soil.

It feeds the tree.

It becomes part of next year’s growth.

I keep thinking

maybe I’d like to be a leaf.

Or a branch.

Or a whole tree.

But I’m not.

I’m a person.

And people don’t get to decompose into something beautiful.

We get grief, and silence, and the heaviness of knowing the world doesn’t stop for us.

Do you see why this sits wrong in my chest?

Why death feels like the loose thread I can’t stop pulling?

I think…

I think if I could die like a leaf,

if I could return quietly to something larger,

if the parts of me that mattered could become nutrients for what comes after…

I think I’d be okay dying.

I think I’d even be brave.

~ Lia