Writing Through the Dark

"Bone. Silver. Bone."

Three Shapes of Memory is a story that came at a time when the season was built around brightness and merriment, even when my chest felt heavy. The holidays this year seemed designed to spotlight what's missing from life. The empty chair, the traditions that feel like costumes, even the way the calendar expects me to smile and "be okay". This year, after unexpectedly losing a family member too soon, December did not arrive; it pressed on every bruise and dug its grip into open wounds.

This story began with a question I could not stop circling: What do I do with light when it feels like a lie? The twins, Thorn & Rose, became my answer. They are the two truths my grief offered me simultaneously. One side refuses to participate in forced cheer, public rituals, and the pressure to have a good time for fear of being depressing. The grief that wants the dark because it holds the unfiltered truth. The other continues to reach for the light, not to pretend grief isn't there, but to find comfort in knowing the little one's energy still surrounds us, just in a different form. The grief that uses small acts of warmth to fight the black winter. Finn stands as the bridge between the two truths I found necessary. He allows both to live without demanding a resolution.

Writing has always been a place where I can put shape to emotions and memories that don't fit neatly into conversations. I get to be honest without having to make it digestible for society. This story, specifically, gave me a place to set the weight down for a moment and look at it without tensing. It didn't fix it, but it let it exist without wrecking my world.

I built this story around small, quiet acts of remembrance rather than big gatherings with loud speeches, so my own grief can exist when it feels it shouldn't. An empty chair, objects placed on the table to say: You still matter, and you are still with us. I'm not writing grief as if it's something pretty or inspirational. Instead, I write it as it lingers in the private negotiations made with survival. Waking up every morning and asking myself: What can I bear? What will I allow myself to feel today? What do I have to do to make it until tomorrow?

When you read it, read it gently. Not because the story or I are fragile, but because grief is. The holidays are brutal when the heart is carrying someone who should still be on earth.

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