Grief Becomes Her
Grief doesn’t always arrive with ceremony. Sometimes it comes softly, sliding in through the cracks in your day and sitting beside you like it’s always belonged. Other times it’s abrupt, a phone call, a knock at the door, a silence that lasts too long. Either way, once it’s there, it never truly leaves.
I’ve lost two best friends. One in a car crash. The other, years later, in a way I still struggle to put words to. And I know people lose friends, people lose family, all the time. I know I’m not special in that sense. But there is something about the kind of grief that comes from losing the person who made the world feel safe. Twice. It rearranges the furniture of your life. Nothing fits quite right afterwards. Every room echoes differently.
The first time, I remember walking into her bedroom while it still smelt like her shampoo. I sat on the edge of her bed and stared at the dresser, the hairbrush still with strands of her in it. It felt disrespectful to move anything. As if tidying up would erase the proof that she was once here. That she used to sit exactly where I was sitting, legs crossed, talking rubbish with a face mask on, making the kind of jokes that don’t land outside the safety of friendship.
I didn’t cry that first day. I just sat there. Staring. Trying to reconcile the idea that a person who once laughed so loudly it startled strangers could be gone. As if sound itself could die.
People talk about grief like it’s a season. Something to pass through. They say time heals. They say “you’ll feel normal again soon.” But normal isn’t a place you return to. Normal is where I lived before I knew what it felt like to pick out a coffin for someone who once plaited my hair.
When my second best friend died, I didn’t bother pretending I’d be fine. I just let it level me. I’d already learned that grief isn’t linear. It doesn’t follow rules. It doesn’t show up, do its job, and leave. It settles in the bones. It becomes a part of you, quiet and ever-present, like a scar beneath clothing.
Sometimes it’s worse because people think you should be okay now. As if losing two best friends in your twenties is something you get used to. But I haven’t. I don’t think I will. I’ve just got better at concealing it. Better at answering “How are you?” without sounding like I’m screaming inside.
I still see them. In places. In moments. A song comes on in the supermarket, and suddenly I’m back in her car, windows down, our voices cracking on the high notes. I open a box of old photos and forget, just for a second, that they’re gone. And then I remember. And the remembering hurts more than the forgetting ever could.
Grief, I’ve realised, is love with nowhere to go. It’s love that doesn’t know what to do with itself anymore. So it turns inward. Becomes heavy. Sharp. Strange. I carry it like a second skin, uncomfortable but familiar. And most people will never notice. Because life keeps moving, and people don’t ask questions when you look like you’re coping.
But I am not always coping.
Some days, I feel like I’m just performing the version of myself that existed before they died. A pale echo. A hollow mimicry of the girl who once danced in kitchens and made late-night plans with people who still had a pulse.
I suppose what I’m trying to say is that grief doesn’t make you wise. It doesn’t make you stronger, not really. It just makes you different. Quieter, maybe. More careful with joy. It teaches you that people can disappear mid-conversation, that “forever” is a dangerous word, and that no one really knows what to say when someone you love dies.
Sometimes I wish people would stop trying to fix it. Stop offering tidy endings. Because there isn’t one. There’s just the slow, lonely work of surviving without them. Of living a life they didn’t get to finish. Of carrying their memory in a world that won’t stop to notice they’re missing.
If you’ve lost someone, and not just lost, but had the world tilt off its axis because of it, then maybe you understand. Maybe you know what it’s like to laugh with guilt. To love again with caution. To wake in the night not with fear, but with remembering. To grieve not just the person, but who you were when they were still here.
I don’t have a bow to wrap this up with. I won’t pretend it’s beautiful, or meaningful, or part of some grand plan. It’s just grief. And I miss them. And it hurts. And I’m still here.
