I have always feared grief

I have always feared grief.

It was an emotion that I was warned about. That I, would soon sit alone, and lick the wounds caused by grief. Grief was always considered something to be feared, like a character in a myth that we shouldn’t dream of ever meeting but is deemed inevitable. Because honestly? Nothing has ever been permanent. Like a tree that would lose all its leaves when the autumn season comes, and dare I say that it will come, things would change.

The color on the walls of your childhood home would fade. The T-shirt you wanted to wear every day in high school would wear off. Your family dog who loves to run towards you when you get home will be old enough to run to you. Old MP3s are no longer in. Friendship bracelets would turn into dusty ones you see now and then when you clean your room. Age would double. Hair would be longer or shorter than before.

You are never the same.

But the unexplained thing about grief was that it was a product of love. Love – a powerful word that would consume us all as it was heavenly. Love makes you feel the unexplainable and do the unspeakable. It makes you high, like walking in clouds with your feet never touching the ground. It makes you see colors you've never seen before. A different kind of hue.

But as the spectrum of colors goes wide, it is also hellish like a shade of grey when grief comes to introduce itself.

Grief is what comes after we learn to love something. It will wait outside the door, ready to knock, after we let something consume us completely. After we went lowering our walls to let love in.

Grief would come in and smash all the tapestries you’ve built. It will drown you in a complete abyss until you no longer feel your feet on the ground. You will forever see the visions of them from a broken glass. Replaying the moments you have thought would last. Their reflection in each mirror, wearing emotions in contrast with yours. They are the orange juice you drink in a glass. You would see them on a random Tuesday on a street as you pass their favorite coffee shop. You would see them in people's windows. In people's eyes. In the crowd.

Grief will be there and it will consume you too even on days when you think you’re finally okay. Because sometimes it doesn’t get better, as grief is love’s infamous twin. It will stay and it will linger.

There are things that time, with its mighty sands, can’t even heal anymore.

Sometimes you just, well, learn to sit with it. You will just find yourself having coffee with grief in the morning...or the afternoon if you’re not a morning person. You will watch movies with its creeping hands on your food, making you lose your appetite. The music on your earphones was its choice, it was its favorite. And you’re just there listening to its wailing. Swallowing every bits of its sad and tragic melodies. Drowning in its given misery.

Here and then, grief is your companion when you’re alone. A shadow following you when you’re out. Someone you didn’t choose. It’s in the things you made and the things you have thrown out.

Sometimes, it doesn’t get better. You just learned to live with it. You learned to mold the vase to its liking – a cracked little friend that we made along the way because the grief was a reminder that at some point in our life, we have felt loved.