The Town Built By Grief
There is a town built by grief. It doesn’t show up on maps or make the evening news. Its streets are cracked with silent questions, and its sidewalks are worn thin by pacing footsteps that never quite leave. The streetlights flicker like fading memories, casting shadows that move just beyond reach. Here, the air tastes like loneliness mixed with regret, and the buildings lean in close, heavy with secrets no one dares to speak aloud. This town is where love and loss collide and where the ghosts of what could’ve been haunt every corner. It’s a place I visit when my mind can’t bear the silence of his absence. The town built by grief is the only place left for a heart that never learned to say goodbye.
Some days, I lie to myself with such conviction it feels like faith. I picture him in that no-name town with rust in the water and a mattress on the floor, living cheap and hidden. Tucked behind drawn blinds, illuminated by candlelight, and dripping in silence. The kind of place where no one would dare ask questions, and that's the whole appeal. Maybe he's there now, barefoot and bone-tired, living off gas station snacks and boiled peanuts, and pretending he never knew me. Maybe he needed out so badly, he peeled off the skin of his old life and slipped into anonymity like a second chance. Not dead. Just… done with us. With me.
I imagine the linoleum is cracked, the lightbulbs flicker like dying stars, and there’s a hollow hum in the air where our bond used to live. And I convince myself that he’s alive out there, just not loving me anymore. That he didn’t leave the planet, just the part that had me in it. Because sometimes that’s the easier thing to believe. That he didn’t die by his own hand… he just chose to erase me. That I exhausted him. That loving me was the final weight he couldn’t carry. That disappearing was mercy. And I hate that I think that. But I think it anyway. Because what kind of person must I be if even death felt like a better option than staying close?
My brain is a liar with perfect pitch. It hums these stories on repeat like they’re gospel. These twisted lullabies I never asked to hear but can't stop singing along to. It tells me maybe he staged the whole thing. That the casket was just theater, that the urns are just props, that somewhere he's breathing easy without the burden of everything here. That maybe he didn't die, he just ran out of excuses to stay. That he folded me up like a bad chapter and closed the book without warning, without ceremony. That loving me was the final plot twist he couldn’t write his way through. And I believe it. I believe it more than the truth sometimes. Because if I’m being honest, I know that I’m too much. Too loud in my pain. Too needy in my love. That I don't just take up space, I infect it. And maybe he finally started to feel that, too. Maybe being my brother was a weight he carried until his legs gave out. Maybe I was the reason. Not the whole reason, but enough to tip the scale.
I know how unhinged it sounds. I do. I know how grief gnaws through reason like rats in the walls, how it chews at the wires until nothing makes sense anymore, until up feels like drowning and love starts to look like desertion. But that’s what this grief has done to me. It’s turned me into a liar who believes her own stories. A twisted narrator rewriting the facts, not because they’re true, but because they bleed in a way I actually recognize. The truth is jagged: if he’s dead, it means we weren’t enough to make him stay. It means I watched the sky fall and didn’t even know it. But if I tell myself he left, just packed up and left, it becomes something I can almost live with. Because then it wasn’t pain that took him. It was me. And somewhere deep in my bones, I’ve always believed I was the kind of person people eventually walk away from. If he died, it’s tragic. If he left, it’s personal. And somehow… the personal attack hurts less. Or I guess maybe it just hurts in a way I actually know how to hold. Because if he’s dead, it means I couldn't save him. But if he left, it means he just didn't want me around.
And some nights, that version where he just left feels easier to cradle than the truth. Easier to hate myself than to hate him for doing what he did. There are hours when I swear I hear him, like really hear him, not in some soft, celestial way, but in a way that guts me. Abrupt. Uninvited. A laugh echoing down the hall that slices through the silence like a knife. It’s him. It’s him. My body believes it before my brain can stop it. I turn, ready to scold him for scaring me, ready to fall apart in his arms, but there’s nothing. Just a still room pretending to be full. Just a ghost of sound. The air closes back in like a fist, and I’m left standing there, stupid and trembling, as if I haven’t already learned this lesson a hundred times: he’s not coming back. My heart gets conned like it’s brand new, and every time it hits me again, it’s bone meeting pavement. Full force. No warning. Just the brutal thud of absence. Grief is a shapeshifter. Sometimes it shows up with his voice. Sometimes it shows up in my own… sobbing, begging, cursing myself for ever thinking I was someone worth staying for.
I wish I could carve that nagging voice out of my head, the one tells me I was the weight that snapped him. That I was too needy, too fragile, too loud in all the wrong places. That he looked at the rubble of who I was becoming and thought, I can’t hold this anymore. That maybe one morning, my name lit up his phone and instead of warmth, it made his chest cave in. That I was the final flicker before he blew the candle out. That my love wasn’t a life raft, it was an anchor. And he drowned trying to carry it. I hate that version of me. The one that weaponizes my own tenderness. The one that makes his death about my defects, like I’m so toxic even grief spirals around me. I miss him in ways that are no longer linear. I miss him like he’s running late, like he’s just gone dark on social media but he’ll text back soon. I miss him like I’m owed a sorry he never needed to give, like I’m the one left holding the apology and the guilt, both. I miss him in the mother tongue of self-blame, in the syntax of shame, in a language only the broken ever really learn how to speak fluently.
I know he died. I know that. I watched the world tilt sideways and never come back. I’ve spoken the words out loud enough times that they should feel real by now. But there’s still a version of me that’s frayed at the edges, permanently waterlogged, that searches crowds like a desperate child in a mall. That version scans every blurry photo, checks every username that sounds remotely like a coded version of him, convinces herself he’s just out there somewhere, tucked into the margins, watching from behind a hoodie, alive but finished with me. Not gone. Just done.
To think someone would vanish from this world just to escape me is so wildly insane, I know this. Like I’m some final boss in a game they couldn’t finish, like my existence was the last straw in a life already unraveling. The logic doesn’t hold, but grief isn’t logical, it’s theatrical and unhinged and sometimes deeply narcissistic in the worst, most wounded ways. Grief hisses lies through clenched teeth, painting you as the villain in someone else’s unraveling just so the ache feels earned. It makes you the villain in someone else’s tragedy just to give the chaos a name. I know it’s not all about me. I know the darkness that took him was bigger than anything I could've caused. But on my worst days, I still imagine that maybe if I had been softer, quieter, easier to love, maybe he would’ve stayed. Because at least guilt gives the illusion of control. At least if it was my fault, then maybe I could have stopped it. And that kind of thinking is both delusional and devastating.
And that version of me, the one that grief chewed up and spit back out, is sick with it. Addicted to the fantasy that he didn’t die, he escaped. That he chose freedom over family. That I was the toxin he had to cut out to breathe again. Because if I make it my fault, I can survive it. If I’m the villain, at least the story has structure. Pain with a plot. But the truth? The truth is a gaping, unscripted silence. He was hurting. I couldn’t stop it. And it had nothing to do with me but that makes it worse somehow. Because then I was just powerless. Just a bystander to his unraveling. Just someone who loved him loudly while he faded quietly.
And if he did choose to leave, if he walked away from all of us on purpose, I think I could understand that, too. I know I could. Some days, I dream of doing the same. Of disappearing without a note, without a sound. Of loosening the chains that keep me tethered to this town, this pain, this version of myself that never quite recovered. There’s a twisted freedom in the idea of vanishing, of becoming nothing so I don’t have to keep pretending to be something. And maybe that’s what hurts the most, knowing how seductive the escape is. How easy it is to imagine him not as weak or selfish, but as the only one brave enough to do what I still can’t. To run. To break the cycle. To stop trying to carry a weight that keeps getting heavier just for existing. So yea, if he just walked away from all of this one day, just left… I get it. I hate it. But, I do get it.
And maybe that’s the cruelest part of surviving, knowing exactly why someone would choose not to.
Author’s Note
Originally written June 10, 2021 - This is the raw confession of a heart still trying to find its way home in a town built by grief
I still visit that town sometimes, the one built by grief, where he’s alive but not with me. In those moments, my mind becomes a cruel storyteller, spinning illusions that feel like refuge. I imagine him breathing somewhere beyond reach, and for a fleeting second, the unbearable silence softens. But beneath that fragile comfort lies a darker truth I’m still wrestling with: the part of me that clings to blame, as if self-hatred is easier to carry than the chaos of anger. The intense anger at him, at the silence, at the finality I can’t undo.
This twisted dance of love and blame is a war zone carved deep inside my chest, where I wear both the shackles of the accused and the armor of the accuser. I am the broken witness and the brutal judge, the wounded and the weapon. Some days, guilt drags me under like quicksand, convincing me I was a weight too heavy, a poison too corrosive for him to carry any longer. Other days, I’m a storm of rage, furious at a universe that dealt a hand so cruel and senseless it shatters all meaning. But most days, I’m just trying to stay rooted in the raw, ragged truth, holding this grief in my hands without wrapping them in the false safety of lies or the soft balm of easy answers. Because this pain refuses to be tamed, and I refuse to look away.
Healing isn’t a place you arrive at. It’s a trembling breath taken on a floor that keeps tilting beneath you, a dance with the earth when every step feels unsteady and unsure. I’m still learning how to live in the cracks between what’s true and what my heart desperately wants to believe, between the ache of love lost and the ache of love that won’t let go. The hardest truth is that some wounds don’t close, they don’t fade… they carve themselves so deep into our bones that they become the very shape of us, the shadow stitched into our skin, the silent pulse beneath every breath. They become who we are.
This piece is a fragment of that endless struggle. It is my way of telling the story I’ve told myself a thousand times and still need to tell again. Because sometimes, the only way to survive the weight of silence is to say the unsayable out loud, to bleed it onto the page, and let the raw edges be the fragile bridge that carries you forward when the world feels like it’s breaking apart beneath your feet.
