I grieve the person I was before I lost you.
I grieve the smile that came so easily, without effort or pretending. The kind of smile that wasn’t weighed down by memory or awareness, the kind that belonged fully to the moment without any shadow behind it.
I grieve the hope I used to carry, the kind that felt light and automatic. Hope that didn’t need protecting. Hope that assumed tomorrow would simply come, and that life would continue in the way I had always imagined it would.
I grieve the innocence I didn’t know I had until it was gone. The version of me who believed that certain things only happened to other people. The version of me who moved through life without rehearsing fear in the background.
And now I am different.
Not less. Not broken. But changed in a way that is permanent and quiet and difficult to explain to anyone who has not lived it.
There is a before and after in my life now, even if the world keeps moving as if everything is one continuous line. For me, there is a clear shift. A moment where something ended and something else began, and I am still learning how to exist in what came after.
I live in the space between who I was and who I am becoming. Some days that space feels wide and unfamiliar, like I am walking through it without a map. Other days it feels like the only place I know how to stand, because it holds both my love and my loss at the same time.
I carry you in both versions of me. In the person I was, who loved you in hope. And in the person I am now, who loves you in memory, in absence, in everything that still remains even when you are not here in the way I wanted you to be.
You did not disappear from my story. You changed it. And you changed me.
And even in the grief, there is something honest about that. A love that did not end, even when everything else did.
