GRIEF

Grief has an official timeline. There's a period of visible mourning, then a return to function. What that timeline doesn't account for: the private experience that runs alongside it. The grief that resurfaces years later in specific songs, in ordinary Tuesday evenings, in a smell that shouldn't mean anything but does. It doesn't move through stages the way the diagrams suggest, and it doesn't end at the expected point.

The pressure to be "doing better" is one of the loneliest parts of grieving. The performance of recovery — for the people around you who need you to be okay — happens while the internal reality continues without announcement.

This thread holds the private account. The grief that couldn't be shown without changing how people see you. The loss that doesn't have a name others would recognize. All of it — said here, to the void, without a timeline.