The Cold
There are mornings when the cold air is a brutal reminder of that last night.
Not a memory you think about but one your body recognizes before your mind can stop it. The moment the air hits my lungs, something inside me collapses. My chest tightens. My breath shortens. My hands ache as if they remember holding something they were never meant to let go of.
The cold stabs.
It doesn’t brush past politely.
It doesn’t ask permission.
It says: Remember?
The snow does this too. It falls quietly, deceptively soft, blanketing everything like mercy. But it lies. Snow remembers. It remembers the silence. It remembers the way the world kept moving while mine split open and spilled everywhere.
I step outside and suddenly I am not here.
I am back in that night where time fractured and nothing made sense.
Where the air felt thick and wrong.
Where screaming didn’t change anything.
I cry out not with words at first, just sound. Raw and feral and useless.
If you were still here, I wouldn’t be in this right now.
If you were still here, my body wouldn’t react like it’s under attack every time winter shows up uninvited.
If you were still here, I wouldn’t hurt like this.
Today, I hurt.
The cold has a way of stripping away all the stories I tell myself about being okay. About being strong. About having learned how to carry this.
It drags me back to the pit.
That dark, familiar place at the bottom where everything echoes. Where the air feels thin and your own heartbeat feels too loud. Where you realize grief isn’t something you climb out of once it’s something you fall back into over and over again.
I didn’t ease my way in.
I didn’t slip.
I jumped headfirst.
The impact knocked the breath out of me.
Suddenly I am crying like it just happened.
Like the years since mean nothing.
Like I haven’t learned a single thing about surviving.
My body curls inward, instinctively, as if it can protect what’s already been destroyed.
Today, I’m scared.
People say grief softens over time. And maybe that’s true sometimes. But no one warns you that it also sharpens. That certain moments cut cleaner, deeper, more precisely than before.
This pain feels honed.
It knows exactly where to land.
And the worst part? I know this place.
I know how it smells.
I know how it sounds.
I know how quiet the world gets when you realize no one can come get you out.
I hate that I know this place.
I hate that the cold knows it too.
Today, I lost again.
Not in the way people expect.
Not with an ending or a funeral or words you can point to.
I lost the version of myself who woke up believing the ground would hold.
I lost the illusion that time alone makes this safer.
I lost the fragile sense of control I carry on good days.
I am not okay today.
Not in the poetic way.
Not in the resilient way.
Not in the “I’ll be fine after coffee” way.
I am undone.
I am raw.
I am angry at a world that keeps asking me to move forward when parts of me are still kneeling in the past, begging someone who isn’t coming back.
I am tired of being strong in silence.
Tired of carrying grief with grace.
Tired of pretending this doesn’t still hurt like hell.
This morning, survival doesn’t look like growth or healing or gratitude.
It looks like standing in the cold, shaking, whispering your name into the air and letting it hurt.
It looks like admitting without fixing it, without reframing it, without apologizing.
Today, I hurt.
Today, I’m scared.
Today, I lost again.
I am not okay.
