Untethered

It’s been three months since my sister died.

Just long enough for the knots to come undone.

Long enough to lose myself.

Somehow, everyone still thinks I’m me.

I wish I was.

When people say a part of them dies with the person they love, I don’t think they’re speaking metaphorically.

The deepest losses happen out of sight.

Some things, mercifully, remain unchanged.

My eyes are still the same colour as my sister’s. They just see the world differently now.

Sometimes it feels like I’m standing just outside my own skin.

I recognize the landscape of my life, but no longer know my way around it.

It’s as though the North Star fell out of the sky, and I don’t know which way is home.

I’ve been turning in circles ever since.

After my sister died, I expected the world to fasten itself around me. Instead, I’ve become untethered—still recognizable from a distance, but impossible to return to.

Nevertheless, each morning I present myself to the day, assembled.

The machinery still works.

Between memory and muscle, I bury bile beneath my ribs and wear myself convincingly.

I don’t know what stage of grief this is.

They all just feel like anger.

If only grief would let me crack open and spill.

Instead, it teaches me how to breathe inside a shell.

Some wounds don’t bleed.

They calcify.

And I’m hardening around the hurt.

What if I spend the rest of my life knocking against the inside of myself?

— a bird in a box.

I can’t shake the strange certainty that I will never be me again.

And the impossible truth that my sister is gone.

There’s nothing remarkable about surviving.

It leaves very little room for bullshit.

The best I can do right now is make room for the grief.

There’s little room left for anything else.

I don’t know how to belong to a world that no longer belongs to us.

The whole world is whirling around me while I sit in the centre, knees pulled to my chest, bracing for an impact that has already happened.

And life has the audacity to carry on.

Everything and everyone is heartbreakingly recognizable.

But nobody’s her.

And I’m not me.