The Dark Side of the Veil
I’m lying in the dark, wide awake again. Every inhale feels like broken glass slicing through my lungs… slow, jagged, and cruel. I can’t help wondering if this is how I stay alive now, by forcing each breath as punishment. My mind is a chaotic, burning wreck of memories crashing into questions, questions spiraling into guilt, and guilt folding into a constant reel of what ifs I can’t shut off. Breathing feels like an act of cruelty. Every beat of my heart feels like betrayal. Every inhale drags across my chest like razor barbed wire. I keep doing it, because my body won't stop, but I don’t know why. My chest rises, falls, rises, falls, like my body didn’t get the memo that my soul is gone. I don’t know what for. I’m not living anymore. I’m just... existing… and barely at that.
Most nights, I just lie here motionless, staring into the ceiling like it might split open and swallow me whole. I stare until my eyes blur, until my head aches, until the silence starts to scream. I keep thinking, if I look hard enough, maybe I’ll find a tear in the fabric of this nightmare… a rip I can fall through, straight into wherever he is. I don’t pray anymore. Prayer feels too neat, too polite for this kind of agony. I beg. I whisper to the dark like it might have ears. Please, don’t make me wake up. Please, just let this be the night I slip away without a fight. If there’s a God, if He’s even real, how could He possibly expect me to keep breathing in a world where everyone I love keeps dying? If He had even a drop of mercy left, He’d just let me go. Let me leave this body, this pain, and this unbearable weight. Let me be where my brother is. Let me be with my mom. Let me be anywhere but here, staring into the empty.
I don’t even know who I am inside this body anymore. It doesn’t feel like mine. It feels like a cage I woke up in one day, and no matter how loud I scream, no one hears it. My hands shake when I try to load the dishwasher, like even the weight of a spoon is too much. My chest knots up when the kids crawl into my lap for comfort, and I try, I really try, to hold it together for them, but sometimes I just want to run. Not because I don’t love them. Because I have nothing left to give to them. My phone buzzes and I flinch. I’d rather throw it across the room than lie again… Than say “I’m okay” to someone who doesn’t even pause long enough to hear the silence behind my answer. The truth is, I’m not okay. I’m barely upright. I feel like a ghost haunting my own life, trapped in a body that stubbornly keeps going even though my soul is curled up on the floor begging for it to stop. I cry in the shower because it’s the only place I can let go without scaring anyone. I cry at red lights, gripping the steering wheel like it’s the only thing keeping me tethered to this side of the veil. Living in this half-life, this shadow version of what used to be me, is unbearable. I waste hours pacing the house, forgetting why I walked into a room, staring at my reflection like I’m seeing a stranger. I look older. Hollowed out. Like grief has taken a scalpel to my face and carved ten years into it in just three months. And maybe it has.
Some nights I end up on the bathroom floor with my forehead pressed to the freezing tile, not because I’m praying, not because I’m trying to calm down, but because I need to feel something real. Solid. But even that cold, hard surface can’t ground me anymore. It only reminds me of how far I’ve floated from everything that used to anchor me. My thoughts have turned into something sharp, something predatory. They whisper things I never used to think. Things that scare the hell out of me. It’s too much. You’ll never crawl out of this. There’s nothing left. Just let go. I don’t know how to fight them anymore. I don’t know how to make them shut up. They twist around my ribs like vines, dragging me down, and I don’t know how much longer I can keep pulling against the weight. I don’t know how much strength I have left in me to keep fighting against them.
I don’t talk about how far gone I feel. About how sometimes I sit so still, I swear I can feel myself fading out. Like I’m vanishing cell by cell and no one can see it happening. Or even care that it is. Is this what dying looks like? Not loud. Not dramatic. Just... quiet. A slow erosion of self. I don’t tell anyone how unsafe my mind has become. How some nights, the silence in my head feels like a loaded gun on the table. I’m scared. Scared of myself. Scared of the things I might believe if I sit in this darkness too long without help. I feel like I’m dissolving. Like the parts of me that once knew how to dream, how to laugh until I couldn’t breathe, how to make plans or even picture next week, they all died with him. And now all that’s left is this shell that doesn’t know what the hell it’s still doing here. I don’t know if I’m supposed to try and rebuild from these ashes… or just keep dragging myself forward, breath by breath, into whatever this is.
Sometimes I can almost see the faintest flicker in a room that’s been pitch black for so long I forgot what light even looks like. I don’t know if it’s instinct. Or desperation. Or maybe it could even be Chris. Maybe it’s him, brushing up against whatever part of me is still reachable, whispering, Not yet. I don’t know. I really don’t. But even I can accept that it’s time to call a therapist tomorrow. Not because I believe it’ll fix anything. But because I’m scared of what might happen if I don’t. Because I don’t trust myself anymore. The things my mind is telling me are starting to sound like pure bliss. And as much as I feel like I’ve already disappeared, I don’t want to slip any further than I already have. I don’t want this pain to win. I don’t want to become another goodbye.
Author’s Note:
Originally written December 12, 2018 - The Quiet Collapse of a Heart Still Beating
These were the words I never said out loud, the ones I only dared whisper into the dark when I wasn’t sure I’d make it through the night. They came from a place so unravelled, I can barely read them now without feeling like I’m watching someone else bleed out in front of me.
Reading this now, 6 years later, I hardly recognize the person who wrote it. I remember being in that darkness. I remember how loud the silence was, how cruel my own mind became. But these words feel like a stranger’s voice echoing from a different lifetime. I was buried under grief, hollowed out by pain, barely able to hold my own body up, yet still breathing, somehow. I did eventually call that therapist. I did get on medication. And I truly believe those decisions saved my life.
Even then, when the phone was ringing and people were checking on me, I felt completely alone. That’s the thing about grief, it isolates you in a room full of people. My thoughts were a category 5 hurricane I couldn't silence, and I walked through most days in a fog of dread and disbelief. But I survived. Somehow, I did. And not only that, I started to heal. Not all at once, and not without setbacks. But I began to see color again. I began to feel the sun again.
I read these words now and want to wrap that broken version of me in the biggest hug. I want to tell her that she’s not done. That the babies she’s trying so hard to keep going for? They’ll be her anchor. That joy will return in moments she doesn’t expect. That she’ll smile again, belly laugh again, love again. Everything flips upside down first, but eventually, it all settles somewhere softer.
Losing so many people in such a short time felt personal. Like God had it out for me. I walked around waiting to die, all while dying slowly on the inside. But I’ve done the work. I’ve met myself in places I never wanted to go. And I’m not in that place anymore. It gets better. Not overnight. Not easily. Sometimes it gets worse before it gets softer. But it does get better. And if you’re in the dark right now, please hold on. There’s still life on the other side of this. There’s still you.
If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health, help is available. Call or text 988 to connect with the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline
