The Second Time

It’s coming up to two years.

Two years since she died.

I can say the words, and they still don’t sit properly.
Two years sounds like distance.
Like something that should have softened by now.

It hasn’t.

What I didn’t expect is this.

The lead-up.

The way my body has started to brace, like something is about to happen.

It’s bizarre, because nothing is.

She’s not going to die again.
There is no phone call coming.
No moment waiting to unfold.

And yet, it feels like there is.

It feels like I’m standing on the edge of those days again.

Like time is circling back, not moving forward.

I catch myself replaying it.
The last days.
The conversations.
The things I didn’t see, didn’t know, didn’t stop.

My brain runs it like there’s still a chance to change the ending.

As if this time, if I look closely enough, I’ll find the moment where I could have reached in and pulled her back.

There’s something deeply unsettling about it.

This awareness that I’ve already lived the worst thing that will ever happen to me…
and still, my body reacts like it’s coming.

I think this is what people don’t understand about anniversaries.

It’s not just remembering.

It’s reliving.

Not fully. Not consciously.
But enough that your nervous system doesn’t trust that it’s over.

Enough that part of you is still scanning for danger.
Still trying to make sense of something that never made sense.

And then there’s this.

The quiet, almost unbelievable fact that I haven’t spoken to her in nearly two years.

Two years since I heard her voice.
Two years since a message, a laugh, a reply.

It doesn’t feel possible.

Because in every other part of life, two years is something.
Growth. Change. Movement.

But here, it’s just… absence.

A stretched-out silence that doesn’t behave like time at all.

Nothing quite sits right.

That’s the only way I can explain it.

The world keeps moving.
Dates keep passing.
People talk about time like it does something helpful.

And I’m here, feeling like I’m about to walk back into something I already survived.

There’s no neat way to hold this.

No lesson.

Just the truth of it.

That grief doesn’t follow logic.
That the body remembers in ways the mind can’t tidy up.
That love doesn’t understand time, so it keeps reaching.

If you’re coming up to a date like this, and you feel that strange mix of dread and disbelief…

you’re not losing it. You’re not going backwards.

You’re standing at the place where memory, trauma, and love all meet.

Of course it feels like this.

I don’t have a way to make it easier.

I’m just noticing it this year.

This strange sense that something is about to happen, even though it already has.

And the quiet, constant truth underneath it all.

I miss her.

Not just then.

Not just in memory.

Now.

Still.

Always.