The Year After

The first month you count the days. The second month you count the weeks. By the sixth month you stop counting and that's when it really begins. Grief moves in like a tenant who doesn't sign a lease. It leaves its things everywhere— a song on the radio, a brand of coffee, the way someone laughs from across the room and for half a second you turn. You always turn. People say: it gets easier. This is both true and a lie. The weight doesn't change. You just get stronger. Your arms adjust. Your spine learns a new way of standing. I still set the table wrong. Two forks, two plates, then I catch myself and the catching is its own small grief— the daily reminder that my body hasn't received the memo my mind signed months ago. The hardest part is not the missing. The hardest part is the ordinary Tuesday when you realize you went an entire afternoon without thinking of them and the guilt hits like weather— sudden, total, from a direction you weren't watching. But here's what no one tells you: that afternoon is not betrayal. It's survival. It's your heart finally letting you put the weight down for a minute. Not because you've forgotten. Because you're learning that love doesn't require constant proof of its own pain to still be love.