SSR Reyes

“I'd always written how grief was hollow. How it was a vast cavern of nothing.
But I was wrong.
Grief was the exact opposite. It was full and heavy and drowning because it wasn't the absence of everything you lost - it was the combination of it all, your love, your happiness, your bittersweets, wound tight like a knotted ball of yarn.
- Florence Day”
― Ashley Poston, The Dead Romantics

“Sometimes I almost go hours without crying,
Then I feel if I don't, I'll go insane.
It can seem her whole life was her dying.

She tried so hard, then she tired of trying;
Now I'm tired, too, of trying to explain.
Sometimes I almost go hours without crying.

The anxiety, the rage, the denying;
Though I never blamed her for my pain,
It can seem her whole life was her dying.

And mine was struggling to save her; prying,
Conniving: it was the chemistry in her brain.
Sometimes I almost go hours without crying.

If I said she was easy, I'd be lying;
The lens between her and the world was stained:
It can seem her whole life was her dying.

But the fact, the fact, is stupefying:
Her absence tears at me like a chain.
Sometimes I almost go hours without crying.
It can seem her whole life was her dying.

- Villanelle for a Suicide's Mother”
― C.K. Williams, Villanelles

“The truth is you can never truly make amends for the hurt you cause; you apologize, you try to atone, at best the scars lighten but they don't disappear.
You live with the pain that you pained someone.”
― Justin A. Reynolds, Early Departures

“That's the thing about loss—it takes everything you love in an instant, yet gives you a lifetime of sorrow.”
― Saim .A. Cheeda