400
There is a girl still living inside her,
buried beneath a life she doesn't recognize.
Not dead enough to be mourned,
not whole enough to feel alive,
just somewhere in between,
where the living go to grieve
themselves.
And isn't that the cruelest kind of haunting?
To be your own ghost,
to walk through the ruins of your existence
and remember when the walls were standing,
when the windows let the sunlight in,
when home didn't feel like a place
she had to escape from.
Once, her body was simply a body.
A vessel that carried her through the world,
never a prison,
never a question,
never something she had to mourn.
Now, even her own reflection feels like a stranger
wearing the face of someone she used to know.
And she looks away,
because some ghosts are easier to live with
when they aren't staring back.
There are things grief takes
that nobody thinks to name.
The ease of being.
The freedom of existing without thinking.
The quiet dignity of doing the simplest things
without needing the world to stop
so she can do them.
Little pieces of a life,
stolen so quietly
there was no moment to scream.
And somewhere along the way,
she became a witness to her own existence,
watching life happen through a window
she can no longer open.
The world outside keeps turning.
The sun still rises for people
who have somewhere to go.
The birds still sing to people
who have something to look forward to.
And time, that merciless thing,
keeps moving as though nothing happened.
But something happened.
Something shifted beneath her feet,
something broke without making a sound,
and now she lives among the fragments
of a life that looks perfectly ordinary
to everyone standing outside the wreckage.
They see a woman.
They don't see the war.
They don't see the nights
when her thoughts become a symphony of screams,
when every unanswered question
echoes against the walls of her mind.
They don't see the anger
she has nowhere to put,
the fear she cannot reason with,
the ache of missing someone
who hasn't entirely disappeared.
They don't see how exhausting it is
to keep meeting the same stranger
in the mirror every morning.
Or how lonely it is
to be surrounded by life
and still feel so far removed from it.
And perhaps the heavens know.
Perhaps the universe has watched her
from behind its indifferent stars,
counting every tear
without ever explaining the storm.
She searches the darkness for a reason,
turns her wounds over like sacred ashes,
wondering if there is a message hidden
somewhere beneath the bloodless ache.
Was she being tested?
Was something being taken?
Was this the price of a lesson
she never agreed to learn?
Or was she simply a woman
caught beneath the weight of a world
that never promised to be gentle?
Even faith feels different in the dark.
Sometimes prayer is nothing more
than a tired soul staring at the ceiling,
too exhausted to form the words,
too hurt to know what to believe,
too human to understand
why surviving has to feel so much like suffering.
And there is a particular kind of rage
in having to be grateful for breath
when breathing is not the same as living.
A particular kind of heartbreak
in being told to stay strong
when strength has become another thing
she never gets to put down.
She is tired.
Not the kind of tired sleep can touch.
Not the kind that disappears
when morning finds its way through the curtains.
She is tired in places
that have no names,
in corners of herself
she cannot reach to soothe.
Tired of the waiting.
The wondering.
The constant negotiation between her body
and the life it will allow her to have.
Tired of being reminded, in a thousand little ways,
of everything that used to be effortless.
And maybe the saddest part
is that she doesn't always cry.
Sometimes she just sits there,
quiet as a church after the funeral,
while a thousand unsaid things
settle like dust upon her shoulders.
Sometimes the grief is so old
it no longer feels like an emotion.
It feels like architecture.
Built into the walls.
Settled into the floorboards.
A part of the house
she never remembers agreeing to live in.
And if this is a spiritual battle,
then what a strange battlefield it is—
no swords, no witnesses,
no visible enemy to curse.
Only a woman
trying to recognize herself
while something invisible
rewrites the rules of her life.
Only a soul
asking the darkness for an explanation
and receiving its own echo in return.
Only a body
that carries the evidence
of battles no one else can see.
There is no beautiful lesson here.
No golden light breaking through the clouds.
No sudden revelation to make the suffering worthwhile.
Just the grief.
The unbearable, unphotogenic,
unromantic grief
of being alive
and missing the life that was yours.
And somewhere beneath it all,
the girl she used to be remains—
not a memory,
not entirely a stranger,
but a quiet presence
standing on the other side of everything
she can no longer reach.
Perhaps she is waiting.
Perhaps she is grieving, too.
Perhaps neither of them knows
how to look at the other
without remembering what was lost.
So the woman keeps living,
and the girl keeps haunting,
and between them lies a silence
too heavy for either to carry alone.
No grave to visit.
No goodbye to speak.
No flowers to lay down
for the person she still is
and the person she can no longer be.
Just a funeral with no ending.
Just a woman
who sometimes feels like the mourner,
sometimes like the ghost,
and sometimes like the house
where both of them learned to grieve.
And the cruelest part of all
Is that tomorrow,
She will have to wake up
And live inside the aftermath all over again.
Some losses have no grave,
So the grieving never ends.
