Heirloom
"Sometimes, the heaviest things we carry are the things we never got to say"
Grief is not a storm. It's the cupboard that won't open anymore.
He found it on a Tuesday. That quiet, off-colored moment where nothing hurts and everything does. A sock without a pair. A phone with the number still saved. The absurdity of a toothbrush standing where no mouth remains.
No one tells you that absence takes up space. That it walks beside you. That it knows your name. That it grows older with you, quietly, like a sibling you didn’t ask for.
Some days he forgets. For a moment, he forgets. And in that forgetting he smiles.
Then remembers.
It isn’t cruel, this remembering. It’s worse, it’s tender. Like something reaching from the dark just to tuck your hair behind your ear one last time.
He speaks less now. The world feels too loud. People say things like “everything happens for a reason.” He wants to ask them what the reason was for that breath not taken. For the empty chair. For the unsaid sentence.
They don’t know.
He has become a keeper of silences. The kind you inherit, like old quilts or broken watches. He wears it well. Most don’t notice. But if you look closely, he walks like he’s waiting for someone to call his name.
And when no one does, he keeps walking.
Not forward. Not backward.
Just… on.
Because love doesn't leave. It just changes its shape. Becomes the wind through a curtain. A half hummed lullaby. A feeling you can’t name in a place you’ve never been.
And he carries it. All of it.
Like a boy holds a kite with no wind.
Still hoping it will rise.
-For people who lost someone they loved.