To the one grieving (inside) Grief looks like waking up and forgetting for three seconds. Then remembering. Then pretending you didn't. It looks like being fine at noon and sobbing at 2:17 over a grocery store receipt, a song, a smell, a nothing. It looks like exhaustion. Not the kind sleep fixes. The kind that lives in your bones, that makes decisions feel like climbing. It looks like carrying a backpack filled with stones that no one else can see. Some days the stones are heavier.

Nomaliso had learned to count the week not in days, but in questions. Monday began with the baker. A kind man, usually, with flour dusted on his apron and a smile that seemed to belong to the bread itself. But this Monday, as she reached for her usual rye, he tilted his head and said, “Your German is really very good. Almost no accent at all. Where do you come from, originally?”

Hurt has a strange way of making a person feel singled out—chosen, as if plucked like ripe fruit. And yet, no one intentionally wants to be hurt. At least, no one worth knowing. When hurt runs deep, it can feel impossible to imagine anyone else suffering to the same degree.

I am mentally transported back to the days when my uncle told stories. As I grew older, I began to fill in the gaps he had deliberately left to make them “age-appropriate.” Sometimes, it was not easy for him to interpret the truth for us—especially when that truth was too explicit in its horrors.

I am not afraid to side with darkness or the dark side. Not because I am reckless, but because I have taken the time to know myself. I have learned to distinguish between beauty and evil, between fear and wisdom, and between the stories we are told and the truths we must discover for ourselves. I have learned to choose my parts—to base them on my own truths, and to put things into perspective when the time, place, and mood are ripe and right.