I Don’t Know Where She Is. But I Still Talk to Her Every Day.
I’ve spent hours; days, weeks, months, staring at the sky, trying to find her.
Trying to feel something. Anything.
Some days, I wonder if I’ve made the whole thing up.
If grief has painted stories over reality just to keep me breathing.
Is she out there somewhere? Is she now nothing? Is she happy or nothing? Is she at peace or nowhere?
But then something happens.
A yellow flower blooms out of season.
A song plays that we used to sing, and I feel her in the music.
I open a book and a recipe is there in her handwriting, waiting.
And in those moments, I don’t wonder.
I know.
There’s no religion that gives me full comfort.
No single belief system that answers it all.
But there’s a quiet knowing in my bones;
Kahlia didn’t just stop existing.
Energy like hers doesn’t vanish.
Love like ours doesn’t end at a hospital bed.
I used to believe in tidy things.
That everything happened for a reason.
That we’re only given what we can handle.
But now I know the world isn’t tidy;
It’s messy and brutal and full of things we can’t explain.
And even so, I still believe in something more.
Not because it’s comforting,
(believe me, nothing about this is “comfort”)
But because I feel her.
Still.
I feel her in my dreams.
I hear her in my head.
I sense her in the pause before a decision,
in the soft hush of a candle-lit room,
in the way the dog suddenly lifts his head and stares at nothing.
Maybe that’s madness.
Maybe it’s magic.
Or maybe it’s love doing what love does,
Refusing to end.
You don’t get over someone like her.
You learn to live beside the loss.
And sometimes, you talk to the empty space
like it’s still her bedroom door, half open,
waiting for a chat at midnight.
I don’t know what the afterlife is.
I won’t pretend I’ve got answers.
But I know this:
She didn’t leave.
Not fully.
Not entirely.
Not from the places that matter most.
So I talk to her anyway.
Because somewhere, somehow,
she still hears me.
And if I’m wrong, I’d rather be wrong than live in a universe where she is nothing.