Your father ripped a hole in you that day. And you will pile gauze on it. And bandage it. And drown it in peroxide, and whatever rail liquor is on special that night. You will pop pills in hopes they contain the antibiotics required to neutralize this festering wound inside of you because grief is never a clean shot. There are no exit wounds. It sits in your gut and metastasizes into a weight too sharp too pass and too heavy to carry.

Grief is the knowledge that life will continue. That the clocks will keep ticking. That the sun will keep rising.

That you will wake up tomorrow.

And the day after.

And the day after that.

And the world will never stop to acknowledge that something is missing.

Not in the way you expect.

There is no wailing, or collapsing to the floor. No breaking of glass or screaming into the void. Those things belong to movies, to stories, and to fantasies.

But real grief — the kind that stays — is quieter than that.

It’s in the floorboards that no longer creak when he’d walk past your room at night.

It seeps into the silence between conversations, into the touch that is too soft, too careful. It settles in the way you go through the motions, standing up, sitting down, eating without tasting. Living, but not really.

You sit at the kitchen table, staring at the open bible at the seat where you father used to sit.

I watch you. I watch the way you press your palms against the wood of the table, the way your fingers flex like you are waiting to feel something. Anything.

I think about how grief lingers in the spaces people leave behind. How the weight of someone’s absence can feel lighter than their presence. How that, more than anything, might be the hardest thing to understand.

How maybe this is the part no one talks about.

You do not move for a long time.

And I do not leave your side.