When Love Stories Become Ghost Stories

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Cry till your chest is a hollow space, they say, as I forget to get out of bed the third time this week.

I must remember how to use these limbs, I think, yet somehow the only thing I can remember is your voice in my ear.

My grief is inconvenient. It is inconvenient indeed to cry in the grocery store. I will never walk these cereal aisles the same.

But you are gone now. Everything I see the around me like a blurry outline — I can never quite focus. Maybe I had been looking at the world through your rose tinted glasses for too long.

Most days drift by like a strange dream, but I am a broken clock, suspended in time.

You are gone and still the day breaks in soft orange hues. I still wake up in the same bed, pour a cup of coffee, read the newspaper and watch the world move on to the next tragedy.

I still feel hunger, and sometimes even sleep arrives like a slow tide that washes me away when the sorrow becomes all-consuming and exhaustion fills my soul.

You are gone and still stubborn flowers bloom through the cracks on the pavement, the kind that always made you smile.

You are gone and still sunshine and laughter fill this world, colors still exist, the sky is still painfully blue, trees bleed in green and nothing matches the darkness in my heart.

Sometimes rage fills my veins at the cruelty of life when I see your clothes hang abandoned in our cupboard.

I try to grasp at rationality in a way my grief doesn’t understand.

What of the love stories that become ghost stories? I hope you are at peace now, but what of the haunted soul in me that you left behind?