07/28/2025
❤️❤️🩹❤️
If they could knock on your door tonight, you know exactly what they’d say.
They’d look at the way you’ve been barely getting through the days—the tight jaw, the hollow eyes, the way you cancel plans you might’ve loved—and they’d say,
Please don’t lose the rest of your life because I lost mine.
They were your loudest cheerleader when they were here.
The one who told you to go for it, to book the trip, to make memories, to say yes. The one who believed in your goodness, your grit, your future.
That didn’t end when they left.
Love doesn’t pack up and go.
It becomes the hand on your back you can’t see anymore, still nudging you forward.
I know it hurts.
I know joy feels like treason.
Like if you laugh too hard, smile too long, breathe too easily, it means you’ve forgotten.
But you haven’t.
You won’t.
The love you shared is stitched into you.
Grief is proof of it—and so is joy.
Both are love, just wearing different faces.
No one told you that healing would feel like betrayal at first.
That you’d have to dig through the rubble to find one small bright thing and let yourself hold it without apologizing.
That moving again would take strength you don’t think you have.
That it would be easier to stay in the darkness, because at least it’s familiar.
But listen: they didn’t spend their life loving you, so you’d spend the rest of yours standing still.
So, start small.
Let the sun hit your face and don’t rush back into the shade.
Say yes to coffee.
Walk where the air moves.
Play the song you both loved and let the tears come, and then—when they’re done—let the warmth of the memory land, too.
Let joy and pain sit at the same table.
They can.
They will.
That’s how you carry them with you.
You are not leaving them behind when you choose to live.
You are taking them along for everything they always hoped you’d still get to see.
Every laugh, every step forward, every quiet moment of peace—they are in it, because they’re in you.
This is how you honor them.
Not by shrinking.
Not by staying in the dark.
But by choosing, again and again, to live a life they’d be proud of.
Because they would want that for you—always.
Forever.
