We are broken.
Our love - once vibrant and full of promise - is now beseeched, interrupted, dissolved. And when the worst has already happened, what more is left to lose?
It baffles me sometimes. That it took a life - one we were meant to create and nurture - to show us how weak our foundation truly was. It was a test. Brutal. Unforgiving. And we failed.
Eighteen months later, we are strangers. The absence of meaningful conversation, the deliberate avoidance, the quiet shifting of rooms in the name of space - it all became routine. We stopped trying. We stopped hoping.
We let adversity win.
We let grief define us.
And in doing so, I lost more than a child. I lost my marriage. My love. My home.
I used to be a fighter. A go-getter. Ambitious. Resilient. But now, I look at myself and see someone who couldn't save the one thing that mattered most. Someone who let the silence grow louder than the love. Someone who let the pain become permanent.
As I look across the room, I see him reach for the remote and switch on the news channel. The volume is low, the visuals flickering across his face, but I know it's not the headlines he's interested in - it's distraction. A way to avoid the silence that's grown louder between us. A silence that has become our language.
But tonight, I decide to break it.