What Grief Knows?

holding the echoes of what can never return

Have you ever felt that shadow that clings
to the streets you’ve walked?
the corners, the lamps,
the way the air once held laughter
and now holds only a memory that refuses to leave?
you think you’ve moved on,
but a song, a scent, a careless word
rips open the seam,
and suddenly you’re back there,
aching, trembling,
whole for one terrible heartbeat
before it shatters again.

Grief is quiet.
it waits in the cracks of your day,
in the drizzle smelling of old pavement,
in the silence after someone says your name.
it hits like lightning,
sudden, blinding
and you feel your chest cave
with all the moments that can never return.
even the people you’ve loved,
even the streets you’ve walked,
cannot give you back what time has stolen.

It is the slow crush of knowing
that you are not the same as before,
that nothing —
no streetlamp, no corner, no laughter
will ever feel the same.
the world moves on,
but grief holds you still,
and you walk among the living
like a ghost of your own self.

And still, you wonder —
what is it that grief knows that i don’t?
the ache arrives every day
without warning,
a hollow homesickness for something unnamed,
a longing for a version of yourself
who was too innocent to know loss,
for faces that never stayed,
for warmth that vanished before you could hold it.

They say peace follows grief,
but what if grief itself is the only truth?
what if it comes not to take,
but to strip you bare,
to lay open all the places you’ve hidden,
all the parts of you that still bleed
because they were never allowed to heal?

Grief lives in the smallest things —
the rain hitting pavement,
the breath after laughter dies,
the song you can’t stop playing in your head.
it reminds you of all you cannot have,
and all you cannot fix.

To grieve is not to move on,
but to endure the hollowness,
to hold the fragments of yourself
that ache and shiver in the dark.
and maybe, in the unbearable weight of it,
you begin — just begin —
and maybe, on the same streets you once mourned,
you begin to feel the faint pulse of your own heart
beneath the wreckage,
to love the pieces of you
that grief cannot destroy.

with love, Apong 🎀