January Third
January third didn’t knock.
It slipped in quietly, like a crack in glass you don’t notice until everything shatters.
That was the day my mother died.
And with her, something in the world went permanently wrong.
Nothing else stopped.
Cars kept moving. Voices kept rising. Life continued its cruel routine, untouched by the fact that my entire universe had just collapsed. People laughed somewhere—carelessly, unknowingly—as if nothing sacred had been torn away.
But inside me, everything caved in.
Life didn’t move forward. It folded inward, collapsing into a hollow space where warmth used to live. What remained felt like a house still standing, still lit—but empty of breath, empty of meaning.
The silence was unbearable.
Not the gentle kind.
The kind that presses against your chest and refuses to leave.
The kind that fills every room once someone who mattered more than air disappears forever.
My mother was not just a person.
She was everything that made sense.
She was the reason the world felt survivable.
Without her, reality lost its logic.
After she died, words became useless.
Food turned to dust.
Time stopped behaving—it stretched endlessly and collapsed without warning. Days weren’t lived; they were endured. Mornings arrived against my will. Nights came heavy, cruel, and long, dragging her absence into bed beside me.
People tried to comfort me.
“She’s in a better place,” they said.
But no place was better than where she was—here. Breathing. Existing. Asking simple questions. Worrying about small things. Loving me in a way nothing else ever could.
Grief didn’t scream.
It stayed.
It sat next to me when I was alone.
It followed me from room to room.
It lay beside me at night, wide awake, refusing to let me forget what was gone.
The world—once loud, wide, full—felt emptied out.
Like a stage after the performance ends.
The audience gone.
The lights too bright.
Everything still standing, but stripped of purpose.
On January third, I learned something no one warns you about:
When a mother dies, you don’t just lose her.
You lose the version of yourself that felt protected in this world.
They say life goes on.
And it does.
But it goes on wounded.
Slower. Heavier.
Dragging an absence that never heals—only changes shape.
The world still exists.
But it is no longer whole.
And neither am I.