04/09/2026
It’s been three months. They say time is a thief, but it is also the greatest illusion. How can three months pass, yet if I sink deep enough into the ways the minute hand weaves, my bones sting as if it were just yesterday. Fresh. Like I’m right back and shattered on my living room floor with the Christmas tree glowing at midnight, physically feeling your soul separate from mine. Grief is both tender and vicious. Impossibly tangled, as delicate as the threads of a spiders web. It can cocoon you up in its warmth of memories, or devour you like it’s been starving for weeks. It’s days of deciding to water your plants, or watch them wilt just like you. There are no words for the in between you sit in, somewhere in the middle of a love so rare and a loss so agonizing. The world is different now. Slow, separate from the noise. Anything shallow or superficial seems like such a waste. The irony in how death makes you feel acutely alive. I see you in everything. A fresh breath of air at dawn that fills your lungs like it’s the first time you’ve felt it. Colors of a sunset so radiant you wonder how your eyes could have ever missed it before. I have thought of you every single day. Some days, I feel your light so close to mine. Your laugh echos in my ears. A melody. Other days I am swallowed whole at a stop light and wonder how I’ll ever live without you. Thank you for it all, Grandpa. The delicate love that softened me and the callousness that readied me for this. Memories that feel like they are trying to kill me and save me all at once. Even in all the roads we walked- I’d take them all again if it meant one more car ride singing your songs, one more night of you sneaking my son chocolates, the way you followed me down the dirt to wave goodbye a second time, to hold your worn hands in mine, to bury my face into that place on your chest that smells like vintage old spice and aftershave. Home. In the void you left, you took the veil with you and have illuminated how truly fleeting, fragile, and beautiful life is. One last act of love you gave. I have loved you with all that I am. Wait for me in the place where souls find each other again, and love never dies.
