no one tells you how vile it is to mourn the living

grieving is my full-time job now: an essay

grief creeps in on an ordinary day. the kind where the sky looks unchanged and your coffee tastes exactly as it did yesterday, but something feels irrevocably misaligned.

you sit in the same seat, scroll through the same apps, hear your name spoken in the same tone by the same people, but your body registers a hollowness that hasn’t yet introduced itself to your mind. there’s no declaration, no discernible scene to anchor the unraveling. just a missed message, a delayed reply, a subtle shift in the way their name sits in your mouth, like it’s growing foreign.

somewhere in your chest, something clenches in response to a presence you can no longer reach but still ache for. you tell yourself not to spiral, that people drift for a hundred benign reasons. but even before the conscious knowing sets in, your body begins to grieve in secret. muscles constrict without cause. your stomach coils in elevators and public bathrooms.

you begin to forget things — small, everyday things that once required no effort. where you parked. whether you locked the door. what day it is. if you’ve eaten. your brain, once sharp, now feels submerged in molasses. and yet, impossibly, you remember the exact cadence of their last laugh. how it started low, soft, almost bashful, before blooming into something fuller, like sunlight spilling over still water. you remember how their head tilted slightly back when it caught them off guard, how their eyes crinkled in that specific way that made the whole room glow.

everything else dissolves, but that sound remains. echoing like a melody you can’t unhear, even when the one who sang it is gone, never offering goodbye.

i’m not immune to it either. i’ve stood in the middle of my apartment, holding my keys, completely blank on where i was headed. i’ve shampooed my hair twice, not from care but forgetfulness. i’ve burned toast three times in one week because i kept walking away, lost in a memory i didn’t invite. and still, i can recount the exact moment their laugh cracked mid-sentence that one night when they were tipsy and trying to explain a convoluted movie plot. the way their fingers curled slightly around the stem of a wine glass.

how they leaned against the fridge like the world couldn’t touch them. i forget bills, deadlines, even my own name at times, but the sound of them? it plays on, like a secret recording that never stops.

and that’s when the grief starts to root.

it burrows deep. and it isn’t grief like death. it’s something crueler, more disorienting, more enduring. there’s no body. no finality. they’re still out there, maybe just a few blocks away, or in a distant timezone, still breathing, still laughing, still uploading stories of coffees and rooftops and a stranger’s hand laced with theirs. and you’re here, holding their shape like it’s still warm, convincing yourself it’s sane to mourn someone who could still call your name but won’t.

there’s this moment, this nauseating moment, when you realize you remember every single detail of how they looked the last time you saw them. not just the outfit or how their hair curled that day, but everything. the way their fingers twitched when they spoke, the delicate arch of their nails catching light just so. the faint twitch in their right eye when they were tired—a near-imperceptible vulnerability.

the exact angle of their body when they reached in to kiss you unannounced. the breath that preceded it, warm and tentative against your skin. you remember the last time they left your apartment and how the door clicked shut a little too gently, as if to avoid waking something. maybe a pet. maybe guilt. now you walk those rooms and nothing fits. their ghost is stitched into your couch cushions. strands of their hair appear in your bedsheets weeks later—dark chestnut, with hints of auburn when touched by sun, soft and resilient like memories you never intended to keep.

a crumpled, half-faded receipt from a bakery down the street, the one with crooked windows and the scent of warm cardamom that lingered on your coat. they bought croissants there once, the flaky kind that scattered crumbs all over your bed, because you’d offhandedly mentioned craving them. you hadn’t meant it to be remembered. but they remembered. and that’s what dismantles you. the way they once listened with intent. the receipt, dated half a year ago, ink fading, bears their name, two croissants, and a lavender latte — your favorite. not theirs. and you keep it. tucked into a drawer with old chargers and stray buttons.

you don’t discard it. not out of hope for their return, though some days you want it so badly it feels like begging. you keep it because the ache has become an old companion. something known. something that proves it happened. i hold that receipt like relic. i’ve unfolded it in the middle of the night to trace the creases they might’ve left, imagining their thumb pressed near the total. i’ve held it in darkness, the way some hold apology notes or infant shoes. it hurts to look at, but it would hurt more to lose it entirely.

pain becomes our final language. and i’m not ready to stop speaking it. not when everything else feels so devastatingly quiet.

it’s maddening how much of your mind becomes a shrine to imagining the mundane details of their life without you. you picture them selecting oranges at the market, fingertips brushing the rind with the same tenderness they once offered you. you wonder if they hum the same songs in traffic. if they still open spotify and scroll to the playlist you made, the one with sunday morning tracks they claimed made the world feel slower.

and you loathe how part of you still wants to be there, even as a thought. it humiliates you. but what worsens it is knowing they might not think of you at all anymore. that your name might no longer echo in their chest. that they’ve adapted to a life without you while you’re still teaching yourself how to exist without splintering at the thought of their hands.

and then there’s your body. god, the way it remembers. you walk into a space and your heart stutters before your eyes process the room. a scent, similar but not theirs, more cedar, less vanilla, halts you. you pass a stranger with their posture, their lipstick shade, their laugh, and your soul jolts like it saw a ghost.

you are haunted by someone still breathing. still brushing their teeth, still tying their shoes, still laughing in that casual, devastating way that once belonged to the most sacred parts of your memory. the ache doesn’t come from absence alone — it’s the knowing they’re still somewhere, pouring their tenderness into someone else with the same ease that once undid you. and your body, unruly and unwilling to cooperate with your logic, still craves them. it aches for the way their hand used to settle at the back of your neck like it had always belonged there, for the quiet heat of their palm, the low timbre of their voice saying your name like a secret. and no matter how many mornings you wake alone, there’s still that blink — that breath — where you wait for them to walk through the door, or to murmur some half-asleep affection from across the pillow. your muscles remember their weight. your skin misses the press of meaning.

you begin to blur around the edges. the mirror becomes a question: how did they see me? did they love me? or did i build something out of glances and gestures never meant to hold weight? you replay their 3 a.m. whisper, “i love you”, and wonder if it was real or just a softness borrowed from the night. i remember once, they said it in the middle of a conversation about nothing, some lazy musing about what we’d name our hypothetical dog, and it slipped out so quietly, so unceremoniously, i almost missed it. but everything in me paused.

and now, i lie awake some nights wondering if they meant it, or if it was just comfort, or loneliness, or routine masquerading as love. and this uncertainty doesn’t just live in my mind; it lives in my breath, in the way i move through the world a little more cautiously now, like i don’t fully trust the floor to hold me.

people tell you to move on. they say time heals, that you have to choose yourself. and i try. i go on walks. i buy flowers. i light that dumb candle they once called “a forest in therapy” and sit with the smell until it makes me nauseous. i try to reclaim things, music, sweaters, parks, parts of myself, but everything feels slightly warped. like i’ve been stretched too far and haven’t snapped back into place. how do you care for a body that is still grieving someone alive? how do you touch your own skin when it only wants theirs? i don’t have an answer.

all i know is that i still sometimes whisper their name into the dark, not because i expect them to return, but because i need to remember what it felt like to be heard.you do the strangest things. wear the outfit they adored you in — the soft navy sweater with frayed edges, to see if it still holds enchantment. linger by places you shared, even knowing it will hurt: the park bench where they confessed their dreams, the coffee shop of first glances, the bookstore with creaky stairs you both climbed with grinning hesitation. you reread old messages like scripture.

you memorize their syntax, the curvature of their words. how "hey!!!" meant joy and "hey..." meant distance. you assign meaning to emojis. dissect the weight of punctuation. you idolize timestamps — 3:17 a.m., the exact time they once texted "goodnight." you crave a message that will never arrive. you imagine, against all sense, that one day they’ll realize what they lost. that they’ll ache for you too. and then you hate yourself for hoping. because hope is the most insidious kind of grief.

this grief is not linear. some days feel almost whole, as if color is returning to the world. and then, without warning, you collapse mid-laundry, weeping because a shirt smells like them. or a song plays in a store and you pretend not to be breaking.

you learn the art of pretending. you say “fine” so smoothly it becomes believable. you become a virtuoso of performance, though inside you’re a crumbling stage, dusty and echoing.

no one tells you how vile it is to mourn the living. it isn’t clean or noble, it’s humiliating. obsessive. irrational. it’s watching them live a life you no longer have access to, and somehow still believing, deep in some feral corner of yourself, that they might turn around and say your name like they used to. it’s responding to shadows, to the sound of their laugh in a café two blocks away, only to realize it’s not them, just someone with the same cadence, the same easy way of joy. it’s checking a group chat you once created together, a little digital altar of your closeness, and seeing their name flash up. they’re still talking, still joking, still there. and you, suddenly mute, can’t find a single thing to say. your hands go cold. your mouth forgets the shape of casualness. your silence becomes the loudest thing in the room.

this isn’t heartbreak. heartbreak is sharp. dramatic. everyone rushes to help you carry it. but this, this is erosion. it’s a slow, invisible unmaking. it’s the smile you fake when someone mentions their name. it’s the ache of pretending you haven’t memorized their schedule just in case you cross paths. it’s watching them in real time, at a party, across the room, speaking to someone else in that tone, the one they once reserved for you, and feeling something primitive inside you collapse.

it happened to me one sunday, a mutual friend’s birthday. they arrived late, radiant, laughing. they hugged me out of politeness. the hug barely touched skin. i stood there, paper plate in hand, watching them cradle someone else’s shoulder in conversation. they looked so alive. so certain. and i, in that moment, felt like a ghost politely pretending to be invited.

you keep going. you answer emails. you fold laundry. you laugh when required. but inside, you are still there, in the last moment that didn’t look final. maybe it was the door closing. or the text left on read. or the silence that followed when you said “i miss you” and they didn’t say it back. time keeps moving. everyone says it gets easier. but the grief of someone still alive doesn’t soften, it just finds cleverer places to hide. and some nights, in the stillness before sleep, you feel their absence climb into bed beside you. warm. familiar. cruel.

you still see them. not just in strangers, but in your own eyes. in the questions buried there: what did i do wrong?

because that’s the cruelty of this grief. it makes you believe you were the one who ruined it. you pick apart every memory. every breath. every glance. every pause. you convince yourself that if only you had loved more carefully, more quietly, more correctly — they would have stayed.

and it consumes you. this grief with no shape, no clear wound to stitch shut. it isn’t clean like death — it’s bottomless, formless decay. it settles into the smallest parts of you: the way you check your phone less and less, not because you’ve stopped hoping, but because hope now feels like humiliation. it seeps into mundane rituals — brushing your teeth, tying your laces, as if at any moment their name might slip out of your mouth like a bloodied tooth. there’s no event to mark its beginning. no obituary to tuck into a drawer.

just this unbearable truth: someone you love is alive, simply elsewhere, and every breath they take is a reminder they are choosing not to share it with you.

some nights are worse than others. the dreams come tender and sharp, like that one i had just a week after they left. in it, we were back on the bench outside their apartment, that one with the chipped paint and half-dead fern. they were holding me again, forehead pressed to mine, whispering apologies for not knowing how to love me better. i could feel the weight of their hand against my jaw, the way they used to ground me with a touch. my body, traitorous and desperate, believed it. and when I woke, choking on breath, arms flung into the cold space beside me, it took me minutes to understand i was alone.

the bedsheets were still creased from where i had turned to find them. it felt obscene, how real it had been. like grief had staged a cruel theater just to remind me of the things i couldn’t unfeel.

you tell no one. you laugh when appropriate. you go to work, answer messages, pretend like your ribs aren’t splintering from how often you hold yourself back from screaming. but perhaps the cruelest part is knowing they’re still out there. breathing the same air. living a life that no longer includes you. waking up to someone else’s sleepy voice. making coffee in a kitchen you will never again lean against. and there are photos now, new ones, ones you’re not in, their smile unchanged, as if your absence barely left a dent. and yet you remain. tethered. invisible. a silent mourner in a one-sided wake.

still loving them with a tenderness that no longer has a name. still mourning what never got the dignity of a funeral. and you call it survival because calling it love feels too tragic, too honest, too much like begging.

buy me a coffee