Eighteen Months Without Her (And Somehow Still With Her)

Eighteen months.
I still can’t say those words without feeling sick.

People talk about time like it’s a healer, but that’s not how this works.
Time doesn’t fix grief - it just folds it into your days until it lives inside you, humming quietly beneath everything you do.

It is easier in some ways, yes. The kind of easier that comes from shock wearing down into scar tissue.
The rawness has scabbed over. I can function, laugh, plan, even find joy - but it’s a strange kind of joy, one threaded through absence.
I’m no longer sitting in the wreckage, but I’m still surrounded by it.

There are still places I can’t go.
Still meals I can’t cook.
Her urn still sits on the coffee table, with fresh flowers every week.
I still catch glimpses of her in strangers; the hair, the walk, the tilt of a head - and for one wild second, I pray it’s her.
Eighteen months later, my body still hasn’t stopped looking for her.

There’s disbelief that never leaves.
Sometimes I think, surely this can’t still be real.
Sometimes I hate the life I’ve had to build around her absence.
But I keep building anyway, because what else can you do?

I still ruminate, still replay the last days, still ache with guilt for all the things I can’t undo.
But I also know now; really know - that I can’t change anything.
That love isn’t a cure, that grief isn’t something you finish.
That living with it is the bravest thing I’ll ever do.

So, I do it for her.
I speak her name out loud.
I write her into every corner of my life.
I live in a way that I hope makes her proud.

She’s gone, yes; but she’s also everywhere.
In the morning light, in the words I write, in the pulse that keeps me here.

The second year isn’t easier, it’s just… clearer.
Less about surviving, more about carrying.
And maybe that’s what love becomes, in the end - the quiet choice to keep going,
with them stitched into your bones.