The quiet room in my heart

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A tall red poppy in a field of golden grasses. The sunset light is making a heart-shaped shadow on the flower.

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Grief does not leave. It learns to fold itself smaller.

In the early days, it was everything—each breath heavy with what-ifs and echoes of silence where cries should have been. My body ached in places I didn’t know could hurt. I felt broken and unrecognizable. Time was both cruel and kind. Cruel, because it kept moving forward, demanding that I rise, eat, and function. Kind, because somewhere along the way, it taught me how to live with absence.

Years have passed. Seasons changed. Dust gathers on your urn. Life moved in different directions, filling out the space that once was. But every now and then, I return to it—a quiet room in my heart where your name still lives. There are no pictures on the walls, no birthday candles or laughter bouncing off the ceiling, but you are there. In the way my breath still catches when I see a child your age. In the dates that approach like whispers I try not to hear. In my thoughts where you appear not as a ghost, but as a possibility.

And yes, I still feel that crushing ache sometimes.

Not always in the open. Often in the stillness of late nights, when the world has gone to sleep and I let myself remember. Not because I’m stuck. Not because I haven’t healed. But because my love for you has no expiration. Because you were real—even if the world never held you. Because you were mine.

Grief has changed, softened at the edges, grown quieter. But its truth remains. It reminds me that I carried love and loss in the same heartbeat. That I mothered a soul I never got to raise. That I am both whole and missing something at once.

So no, I do not apologize for the sadness that still comes in waves. I do not hide the pain that flares when I hear the words “should’ve or would’ve been.” I hold it, gently, like I would have held you.

I know, too, that moving on is not a failure, that healing is no betrayal. This life, this breath is me honoring something sacred.

And you, my almost, my always—you are still worthy of being missed.

 

What does the quiet room in your heart look like?