The Plank Between Us

Nothing prepares you for grief that is still breathing.

For the weight of loss when there is no funeral, no finality, no neat ending that lets you fold it away.

For grieving someone who is still out there, still walking, still laughing, still moving through the world—but not with you.

We stood at the edge for so long, both of us knowing, both of us feeling the wind shake beneath our feet. But neither of us could walk the plank. Neither of us could be the first to let go. So we stayed, not together, not apart, unraveling thread by thread, until one day, the rope was gone and we were left with nothing but the empty space between us.

I thought that would be the worst of it.

But nothing prepares you for the way the world closes in, how it folds over itself, muffling color, dulling sound. How familiar places become graveyards of memory, how the air itself feels thick with absence.
And nothing—nothing—prepares you for the knife that twists deeper when you watch from the sidelines.

Watching him become everything I hoped, dreamed, begged for. Watching him rise into the man I always knew he could be—just not for me. Watching him step into the life I imagined, the one we spoke of in whispers, the one I ached for, the one I would have followed him into blindfolded—except now, someone else stands beside him.

The world does not teach you what to do with that kind of pain.

No one tells you how to breathe when the air is thick with all you lost. How to move forward when your shadow still stretches back toward him. How to stand steady when every step feels like walking on the ghost of what was.

The love does not go away.

It stays, an ache beneath the ribs, a quiet hum in the background of a new life. It does not demand. It does not fade. It simply is. A part of you, woven in, stitched between the person you were and the person you are still becoming.

But you learn.

You grow around it.

You stretch, you expand, you widen your arms to hold new love, new laughter, new pieces of a life that was never meant to stop. You learn that grief does not shrink, but you grow. You make space for both the ache and the joy.

And one day, you find yourself standing in the light again, not because you stopped loving, but because you learned how to love more.

Because the heart—when broken, when shattered, when left behind—does not shrink.

It learns to hold more than it ever thought it could.