A Love Letter to Kahls, Who Keeps Teaching Me

After Kahlia died, I didn’t want to write.

I didn’t want to do anything; everything that looked like moving forward felt wrong and I simply wanted the world to stop, to honour her absence with silence. But grief, strange creature that it is, wouldn’t leave me alone. It began whispering at night, pulling words from places I didn’t know still existed.

I think now that grief became my muse. Not the gentle, candlelit kind; but a wild, insistent muse who demanded I pay attention. Every time I wrote, I felt her presence: not the child I lost, but the love that refused to disappear with her body.

People said time would heal. It didn’t. Time only stretched, felt at times alien. What saved me were sentences; small, clumsy attempts to speak the unspeakable. Writing didn’t fix anything, but it gave shape to the ache, and it let me breathe again.

Some mornings I still wake reaching for my phone to message her, the body forgetting before the mind remembers. Other days, she catches me off guard; a girl on the street with her walk, a photo I wasn’t ready to see, the way someone laughs like her. She keeps showing up, uninvited and utterly welcome.

Grief, I’ve learned, isn’t a wound to heal. It’s a relationship; ongoing, evolving, often inconvenient, but full of life. It asks us to stay soft in a world that wants us to be finished with sorrow. It asks us to keep loving without proof.

People flinch when I say her name. I understand. We’ve built a culture that fears grief like contagion. But the truth is, grief is love’s echo; its shadow stretching past the edges of what we can hold.

So, I write. I write because she deserves to be spoken. Because love deserves witnesses.

This, I think, is what the art of writing really is: love refusing to be quiet.

And every time I sit at the page, I feel her again; not as memory, but as motion, as breath. As the muse who reminds me that creation and loss were never opposites. They’ve always been the same act: trying to bring something beautiful into the world, knowing it won’t last, and doing it anyway.