Grieving Myself by Cordelia Cross

I used to collect tomorrows like they were loyalty points.
Turns out the rewards program was a scam.

I had a life waiting with its sleeves rolled up,
a map full of cities,
a body I trusted
the way children trust summer
to come back.

Then something invisible
learned my name
and never forgot it.

Now every morning is a negotiation.
My bones draft contracts
my nerves file complaints
my heart keeps minutes
from meetings I never agreed to attend.

People love to say,
"You don't look sick."

Neither does rust
until the bridge remembers gravity.

There is a peculiar grief
in mourning someone
who is still introducing herself.

I miss the woman
who bought notebooks
for futures she'd barely begun to imagine.
The one who believed
five year plans
weren't science fiction.

She's still here,
technically.

Like a favorite house
after the fire.
Same address.
Different weather.

The cruelest part
isn't the pain.

Pain is loud.
Pain at least has the decency
to announce itself.

It's the quiet thefts.

The career that became
a conversation in past tense.
The friendships
that couldn't survive
a canceled calendar.
The invitations
that stopped arriving
because absence
became easier to remember
than hope.

Chronic illness
is the world's longest magic trick.

Now you see a future.

Now you don't.

And somewhere,
a healthy version of me
is probably annoyed
she forgot her keys,
completely unaware
that I'd trade every dream I buried
just to have that problem.

I have become fluent
in pretending.

"I'm doing okay."

The sentence arrives
better dressed than the truth.

Because the truth
hasn't slept in years.
It smells like hospital corridors,
cold tea,
and birthdays spent apologizing
for leaving early
from a life
I desperately wanted to stay for.

Still,

I keep planting impossible gardens
inside a body
that mistakes hope
for trespassing.

Not because I believe
everything will bloom.

Because grief
is not the opposite of love.

It is love
with nowhere left to live.

So I carry both.

The life I have.

The life that still haunts me
like a beautiful rumor.

And if I laugh
a little too sharply,
forgive me.

Humor is what happens
when heartbreak
learns excellent timing.

I never became
who I thought I would be.

I became someone
who could survive
watching that person disappear

without ever getting
to attend the funeral.