For Papa

Memory is a room I can’t leave.
The walls echo with your laughter, soft and familiar,
but the silence that follows is deafening.

Life is moving forward, even without you.
The world’s spinning, the calendar changes, the sun still rises, people laugh, take photos, toast champagne.
Things are happening.
I am living… but ain’t alive!

Every day, I miss you in a different way.
Some days, in tears. Other days, in the way my hands tremble when I fold your favourite shirt that still smells like summer.
Nothing is complete without you. And nothing ever will be.
I am not the same, and I won’t ever be; not in the way that matters.

They say, grief dulls with time.
That it softens, settles, fades, becomes a whisper…
They’re wrong.
It sharpens. It shapeshifts.
It emerges in a song you used to hum, a joke you’d ruin on purpose, the emptiness of your seat at the dinner table.

Grief is a wound that never heals. It sinks, deeper.
Until it becomes a part of you…
Your breath, your blood, your bones.

You grow more guarded, more anxious,
You hold your people closer, like they’re made of glass and you’re made of fear.

You live two lives.
One is visible. You smile, you speak, you show up,
You do the things.
The other is hidden in the folds of your mind, where time still belongs to you, and laughter hasn’t turned to ghost.
Where you exist, untouched by loss.

Memory is a room I can’t leave.
I sit by the window, hoping that in my defiance, in my unwillingness to let go, you might forgive!

– Neha Sharma