The grief sits in my skull
like eels thrashing in warm oil,
slick, furious, impossible to grasp.
Some nights I lie awake
listening to the house breathe
without him,
every creak a muffled reminder of his footsteps.
Some mornings I wake forgetting
the world has split in two—
Then remembering hits
like a door
slamming shut
on my fingers,
again and again
and again.
To the outside I look slow,
tongue lagging, feet unsure,
eyes glassed wide
—
but it is not slowness.
It is not slowness.
It is lightning trapped
beneath my ribs,
a thousand thoughts
colliding at light speed
while my mouth moves
like treacle in winter.
Words arrive mangled,
half-cooked,
half-caught,
threadbare
It is not confusion—
it is too much clarity
all at once,
seeing every future
we will never have
in the space between
one heartbeat and the next.
They think I hesitate
because I don’t understand.
But I understand
everything
too completely:
how his pillow holds
no indent anymore,
how “always” became
”never”
in an instant.
It is not that I move slowly—
it is that I am drowning
in the speed of realisation,
gasping between waves
of what was
and what will never be.
I am a broken compass
spinning wild in his absence,
every direction wrong
without his steady North.
Some days I am a house
with
all the windows blown out,
wind rushing through rooms
where warmth once lived.
Other days, a violin
with half its strings snapped—
still trying to make music
with what remains.
A ship without anchor
in an endless sea,
waves of memory
washing over the deck.
A garden in drought,
roots reaching deep
for water that was him,
finding only dust
and the terrible fertility
of my own survival.
Stumbling with each step
from a storm too violent
to step through clean.
This is the mind in grief —
too fast for the world,
too broken for its own speech
And the weight—
Christ, the weight.
Grief is a black hole
with his shape,
pulling everything
toward its terrible centre.
I am being spaghettified,
stretched thin as wire
while compressed
into something
unrecognisable.
Time bends around this loss.
Minutes stretch into years
when I reach for him
in sleep.
Years collapse into seconds
when I remember
he is gone.
That morning waking —
hope colliding
with reality
at the speed
of remembering —
The impact.
The collision leaves
debris fields
in my bloodstream —
fragments of yesterday
cutting through
the soft tissue
of today.
I am the wreckage
of two worlds
meeting:
the one where
he is still here
and the oone where
he will never be again.
Every morning
I survey the damage:
what survived
the night’s impact,
what new parts of me lie
scattered and broken
across tyhe floor
of consciousness.
My mind —
this terrible elastic thing —
stretches like taffy
pulled between
what was
and what must be.
Silk ribbon
caught in the wind
of a moving train,
flapping violently,
torn but not breaking,
whipping back and forth
between stations
of sanity.
One moment
compressed to a pinpoint —
dense as a neutron star
holding his last words.
The next,
stretched thin as gossamer
across the endles expanse
of everything
he will not see.
But here–
here is the cruelest physics:
I must absorb
not just my own
gravitational collapse,
but theirs too.
The children’s tears
add mass
to my already
buckling structure.
His brothers’ bewilderment
becomes additional
atmospheric pressure
I must contain.
My mind
expands to hold
four kinds of breaking
while appearing
intact enough
to make supper,
answer the phone,
with a voice
that sounds
almost normal.
These movements–
the crushing,
the stretching,
the terrible elasticity —
they bruise but do not break.
No clean snap
of something
ending.
No merciful
shattering
into pieces
too small
to feel.
Three months
of bending
without breaking,
edges raw
and thin
as tissue paper,
but still–
impossibly–
alive.
And then
the guilt
more crushing
than the grief:
HOW IS IT I AM ALIVE?
The cruelest joke
the universe
has ever played:
I can bridge
the veil
for strangers.
Their dead
come to me
with messages
clear as
morning bells.
But him?
Silence.
The one voice
I would trade
every other gift
to hear
just once —
nothing.
I am a radio tuned perfectly
to every frequency
except
the one
that matters.
But the body —
O, the body
remembers eveything.
My skin
still reaches
for the familiar
geography
of his warmth.
My hands know
the exact
texture
of his curls
between my fingers,
the way they caught
the light
in the morning.
I wake
with phantom
stubble burn
on my cheek,
my lips
still swollen
from kisses
that exist
only in
muscle memory.
This is
the loneliness
beneath
the loneliness–
skin
that learned
to be
complete
only
in
his
persence.
This is my
Ground Zero.
The future we built
with such careful hands —
every plan,
every dream,
every “when we’re old”
conversations —
obliterated.
I walk through
the wreckage of our
together-world
Here, fragments
of the trips we
planned for holiday,
there, the shattered
blueprint of how
we would age
side-by-side.
The children
look ahead
to their horizons.
His brothers retreat
to their
separate lives.
But I am
the only survivor
of a country
that no longer
exists.
I am the only
citizen
left of a nation
built for two.
This is
the loneliness
beneath
all loneliness–
not just missing him–
but missing the
entire world
we were supposed to
inhabit together.
-nusye mccomish, southseaeyes, 2025 08-
