Ghost Notes.
Lately, I’ve been haunted by the smallest things. An empty chair at the dinner table. A video I can’t bring myself to delete or share with anyone. The way the sunlight hits the floor at 6:47 p.m.—the exact time I learned my brother died.
Grief doesn’t scream anymore. It whispers. It shows up in skipped songs and silenced phones. It shows up when I forget why I walked into a room. When I scroll through my contacts and hover over his name like my thumb might accidentally call him back to life. They don’t tell you that loss lingers like background noise. That even when you laugh, there’s a low hum of sorrow beneath it. That even on your best days, grief is still there, sitting quietly in the corner of the room, patient, polite, but heavy as hell. There’s a particular ache that comes from watching the world keep turning when yours has stopped. Babies are still born. People still get married. The sky still turns pink at dusk. And I’m still here, half-alive, watching time paint over memories that once held such vibrant color. I miss my brother in ways that language can’t hold. Not a minute goes by where he’s not woven into something… into the way I hesitate before making a decision, or the way I hear a song and instinctively reach for my phone to send it to him. I feel like I’m disappearing in pieces.
Some days, I wake up and don’t recognize the girl blinking back at me in the mirror. There’s an emptiness behind her eyes that feels permanent now - like someone turned the lights off inside her and forgot to come back.
I used to be softer. I used to answer the phone without a second thought. Now it rings and rings and I stare at it like it’s a test I’ll always fail. I let messages pile up like unanswered prayers, not because I don’t care, but because I don’t know how to show up as a version of myself that isn’t pretending.
Somewhere along the way, I learned how to smile with my mouth closed, how to cry without sound, how to vanish without moving an inch. I became the master of invisibility. I thought it would keep me safe. But now I just feel unseen, unheard.
And still, I just keep writing as if these words matter to anyone other than me.
Because even if no one ever reads this, it means I’m still here. Still trying. Still speaking back against the silence. Every word is a breadcrumb in the forest - proof that I haven’t completely disappeared. I’m still here.
I think about Chris a lot. Not just the ending. But the middle - the way he laughed from his stomach, the way his eyes lit up when he talked about dreams that felt too big for this world. He was magic. Wild, stubborn, beautiful magic. And then he was gone. I wonder if he knows I still talk to him. That I still look for signs. That I still feel like I’m living a half-life without him. That sometimes I hear his voice in the wind, laughing, and I turn my head so fast it hurts. I don’t know if he’s listening but some nights, I still call his name in my sleep. And in that space between dreaming and waking, I still believe he’ll answer. I imagine his voice cutting through the quiet like sunlight through trees, laughing at me for being dramatic, telling me to quit crying and come watch something stupid on TV. But the room stays silent. And I’m forced to remember, all over again, that silence has stolen his place. Grief is a shapeshifter. Some days it curls itself into something I can carry in my pocket- small, folded, quiet. Other days it spreads like ink in water, dark and unstoppable, seeping into, staining everything I touch. Then there are days like today, where it claws at the walls of my chest and demands to be felt like fire, like flood, like a scream no one can hear. I keep trying to make sense of it. But grief doesn’t speak in logic. It speaks in static, in phantom footsteps, in memories that hit like sucker punches, physically snatching your breath from your lungs. I miss him in ways I didn’t know were possible. It’s not just the big things, it’s the thousand tiny deaths that happen every day since he died. Like when I reach for my phone to call him after a weird dream, or when something hilarious happens and he’s the only person I need to tell. It’s when I see his face in my daughter’s smile and have to pretend my heart didn’t just shatter in the middle of a grocery store aisle. I have to keep pretending I’m okay when most days I’m a walking open wound. I am still learning how to breathe without him. Still learning how to walk without limping. Still learning how to smile without guilt. Still learning how to forgive the parts of him that gave up, and the parts of me that couldn’t stop him. I’ve written him a thousand letters I’ll never send, apologies that come too late. But I send them anyway, out into the atmosphere, hoping the universe finds a way to hand-deliver them to wherever his soul landed. I write anyway. Because writing is the only way I know how to stay human. The only way I know how to breathe without unraveling. If I could write him back into existence, I would. If I could trade every piece of myself to bring him home, I’d do it a thousand times over.
Author’s Note:
Originally Written: March 6, 2019. Late, when the world was quiet, but my grief wasn’t.
I wrote this one in the thick of it — when loss wasn’t something I talked about in past tense, but something I was actively drowning in. The air felt heavy. My body, foreign. My memories, sharp and unavoidable. It wasn’t the kind of grief that screamed anymore — it was the soft, steady ache of absence. The kind that lingers in shadows and sinks its teeth into ordinary moments.
Chris had only been gone a few months when these words poured out of me. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t not write. I needed somewhere to put the pain that didn’t fit in a conversation or a prayer. So I tucked it here — inside metaphors and memories, inside a truth that still breaks my heart to read.
This piece is tender. It's jagged. It's honest. And more than anything, it's a timestamp of the girl who still believed she might wake up and find it had all been a terrible mistake. I believed that for longer than I care to admit, that I’d wake up for that nightmare. If you’re reading this and you know this kind of ache - I’m sorry. And I’m with you. We survive it one breath at a time. One sentence at a time.
And sometimes, we write just to prove we’re still here.
