The Moment That Stays

A poem about grief’s quiet arrival, carving absence where words cannot reach.

You never forget that moment.
The one that doesn’t arrive with thunder,
but with silence
that suddenly weighs too much.

You gasp for air
and meet only emptiness,
a hollow so deep
it echoes when you breathe.

Your chest tightens,
not with fear,
but with grief that has settled into your bones.
Pain blooms inward.
Sharp.
Crushing.
Unrelenting.

And this is the part no one warns you about:
your heart doesn’t just ache,
it breaks.
Loudly,
quietly,
all at once.

And somehow the world keeps going.

But you,
you are somewhere else entirely,
floating inside a moment
you never asked to enter
and will never fully leave.

Pain has no decency.
It does not wait until you are alone.
It does not care if you are dressed for it,
if you work in ten minutes,
if you have plans in an hour.

It arrives.
Uninvited.
Unapologetic.
And when it does,
everything inside you shatters so quietly
that even you wonder if it really happened.

You try to move,
to stand, to speak, to explain,
to make it make sense even to yourself.
But words no longer fit.
Language feels too small
for something this vast,
this consuming.

So you go still.
Not by choice,
but because there is nowhere left to run
when what chases you
already lives inside your ribs.

You blink.
You exist.
But you are not here.
You linger just beneath the surface,
watching the version of you that once was
go on without you.

You don’t forget that moment
because it becomes you.
Not with fire,
but with absence,
the unshakable knowing
that something has been lost
that no one else can see.

And for the first time,
you understand:
people can disappear
without ever leaving.