Oceans of You

It comes in waves.

Not gentle ones—no soft tide brushing the shore—but the kind that knock the air out of you, drag you under, leave salt in your throat and sand in your teeth. One minute I’m standing, functioning, answering texts, pretending I remember how to exist without you. The next, I’m folded in half by something invisible, something heavy and sharp and impossibly loud.

Grief doesn’t ask permission. It just arrives.

I replay everything like a broken ritual. Every word, every silence, every almost. What if I had held on tighter? What if I had let go sooner? What if I loved you too much, or not in the right way, or not in the way you needed when it mattered most? I pick apart versions of myself like evidence at a crime scene, trying to find the exact moment I ruined us.

Or maybe it wasn’t me.
Or maybe it was always going to end like this.
Or maybe that’s the cruelest part—there’s no clean answer, no single thing to blame, just this endless gray space where love used to live.

Some days I convince myself I’m okay. I wake up and there’s a thin layer of distance between me and the pain, like glass. I can see it, but it doesn’t touch me. I think, this is it—I’m finally getting through this.

And then something small breaks it.

A song.
A smell.
A random Tuesday afternoon where the light hits the room the same way it did when you were here.

And suddenly you’re everywhere again.

In my head, in my chest, in the empty space beside me that still feels shaped like you. My body remembers you in ways my mind wishes it could forget—muscle memory of your touch, phantom warmth, the instinct to reach for someone who isn’t there anymore. It’s physical. It aches. It lingers. It refuses to be reasoned with.

I miss you in the dumbest moments. The quiet ones. The ones that don’t look important until there’s no one to share them with.

And that’s the part no one prepares you for—the way grief settles into the ordinary. It’s not just crying at night. It’s brushing your teeth and realizing no one will ever stand beside you the way you did. It’s laughing at something and then feeling the laughter collapse because you can’t send it to them. It’s learning that absence has weight.

I carry you everywhere. Not the real you—just the pieces I can’t put down. The memories that won’t stay still. The future that doesn’t exist anymore but somehow still hurts like it was stolen.

We had plans. We had a shape, a direction, a we.

Now it’s just me, trying to make sense of a life that suddenly feels misspelled.

It comes in waves.

The missing you.
The loving you.
The knowing I have to keep going without you, even when every part of me is still turned in your direction.

And the worst part?

Even now... after everything, after the unraveling, after the silence.... a part of me would still choose you.

Every time.