Grief has a strange way of arriving whether we invite it or not. Sometimes it slips in quietly and sits beside you for a while.
Other times it bursts through the door and rearranges the entire room. Lately it has been doing a little bit of both in my life.
It has been a while since I last wrote. In that time my world has shifted and pulled and tugged and broken in ways I did not expect. Writing has always been the thing that brings me back to my center, even when everything else feels scattered.
Lately, I have been exploring parts of myself I never really confronted before. One of those things is grief. She is a monster I have mentioned here and there, but lately she has been showing up more often. Whether we welcome her or not, grief eventually finds us.
Some of the grief we carry is personal. Some of it is shared. Right now, a lot of us are living inside a communal kind of grief shaped by politics, uncertainty and ignorance. There is something terrifying about living in a world where it feels like your rights could be taken at any moment. That fear settles into the body. It follows you to bed, sits with you on the couch and hums beneath daily life. What makes it worse is when the people you love do not reach out, or do not know how. Sometimes they do not understand what you are carrying. Sometimes they never ask. That silence makes the grief heavier.
We all hold that weight differently. Some people have community. Some have one person. Some have no one at all. But grief does not really care how many people are standing around you. It still sits in your chest the same way. It still follows you into the next day. There is no place to neatly set it down. You carry it because there is nowhere else for it to go.
My own relationship with grief took a long time to recognize. When you are a young queer person, grief does not always arrive with a name. Sometimes it looks like realizing you no longer want to wear dresses to church. Sometimes it looks like realizing you do not want to be in church at all, especially when the same pastor who hugs you goodbye also preaches that people like you are wrong.
Over time, I learned that grief does not always make you smaller. Sometimes it forces you to become someone more honest. For me, writing has been one of the few places where grief has been able to turn into something useful. It has given me somewhere to put what I cannot explain out loud. It has let me turn pain into something that can still breathe. When everything else feels uncertain, writing has helped me make meaning out of that hurt.
This past year, grief has been louder than usual. I lost a job I loved more than anything I had done before. For a while I really believed I was living in my purpose. I felt useful. I felt steady.
Then it ended the way so many jobs do, with layoffs and the reminder that love for your work does not always protect you from losing it. At the same time, life kept moving. I got engaged. I am still engaged. But this one year of engagement has challenged us more than the four years before it. Love is beautiful, but it is also work. When two people carry their own histories of grief, those histories find their way into the relationship whether you are ready or not.
I also have family members who are getting older and sicker. These are people whose love shaped me in ways I am still uncovering. Their presence has been one of the greatest gifts of my life, and now I know the end for some of them is not far away. That kind of grief begins before the loss does. It stands quietly in the room and waits for you to notice it. It changes the way you look at time. It changes what matters.
That is what makes thinking about the future feel so complicated. I want to have a child someday. I want the people who held me so gently to hold my child too. I want them to pass along that warmth, that steadiness, that particular kind of love that made me feel safe. But there is a chance they may not be here for that. That realization carries its own grief. It is not only about losing people. It is also about losing the future you pictured with them in it.
Still, I am learning that grief changes you, and not always in empty ways. Maybe it makes you softer where life tried to harden you. Maybe it pushes you to create memories on purpose. Maybe it makes you say what you mean while people are still here to hear it. Maybe it pushes you to write the poem now instead of later because later is never guaranteed.
This journey has left me in tears at the beginning, and I know those tears will meet me again somewhere in the middle and near the end. But if grief has taught me anything, it is that love is not separate from it. Love is the reason grief cuts so deep, and it is also the reason we survive it.
When everything else feels uncertain, love is still the thing that carries us.
Bryana is a Black and Puerto Rican writer from Orlando. Most recently, she had a poem published in the Saint Paul Almanac’s 20th anniversary anthology. Her work has also appeared in Women Who Roar, Unstamatic Magazine, and Eros and Eris. Outside of writing, she enjoys baking and long walks on the beach.
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