What Remains

There is a particular kind of silence that follows loss.

Not the ordinary quiet of an empty room, but a silence with weight. It settles into corners, into cupboards, into conversations that stop just short of where they once would have gone. It lingers in the spaces where something — someone — should be.

People speak about time softening grief. I am not sure that it softens it. I think it teaches you how to carry it. At first it feels impossible, like trying to hold water in your hands. It slips through your fingers, it soaks into everything, it leaves you trembling. And then, somehow, you learn to live with wet sleeves.

There are losses that rearrange the furniture of your life. They move the walls. They alter the shape of every future plan. The world continues — traffic moves, emails arrive, seasons change — and yet your internal landscape has shifted. You become someone who measures time in “before” and “after.”

The hardest part is not always the moment of loss. Sometimes it is the ordinary days that follow. The supermarket aisle. The school shoes on sale. The offhand question: “How many children do you have?” The way your heart answers differently from your voice.

Grief, especially this kind, is not always loud. It is not only weeping and breaking. Often it is quiet. It is strength you did not ask to develop. It is getting up because you must. It is loving fiercely what remains, even when your arms feel emptier than they should.

There is something else, too — something people do not speak about enough. Love does not disappear. It does not reduce or fade simply because the person you love is no longer here in the way you expected. That love remains, unchanged in size. It has nowhere to land, and so it settles inside you. It becomes part of your marrow.

You learn that grief and gratitude can sit in the same room. That joy can return in small, careful ways. That laughter does not mean forgetting. It simply means your heart is still capable of light.

To those walking this road now: there are no correct words. No timetable. Only breath by breath, day by day. And the quiet knowing that the depth of the grief speaks to the depth of the love.

Some lives are brief. Some goodbyes come too soon. But what was loved so fiercely does not vanish. It changes form. It becomes memory. It becomes tenderness. It becomes the way you hold others a little closer.

For now, it is enough simply to carry it.

To wake up.
To breathe.
To love in the only way you can.

There is no need to be strong beyond this moment. There is only today. And that is enough.

A Life That Finally Exhales

I know I’ve been a little MIA since the end of 2025, but I’ve entered a new stage of normal in my life—and it’s been… well, weird.

In short, I’ve spent the better part of the last three years studying. In October, I completed my Business Diploma, and in January this year, I wrote my final regulatory exam. For a long time, those milestones felt so far away that I wasn’t entirely sure what life would look like once I reached them—only that everything depended on getting there.

When I look back now, my life feels like a series of overlapping storms, barely giving way to the next before I had time to catch my breath. I became a teen mom at 19. I went through a messy divorce at 22. I learned how to navigate the complexities of raising two children with additional needs in a world where resources were limited and trauma was poorly understood. Along the way, I was also learning how to manage my own mental health, taking a 180-degree leap of faith with a career change, supporting my first child through matric, and holding myself together long enough to finish my studies.

For years, life has felt like survival dressed up as momentum.

On the 21st, I walked out of the exam room with one simple plan: go home, take a bubble bath, and finally read the book that had been sitting next to my bed, quietly judging me for months. I got home, ran the bath, climbed into bed afterward… and promptly passed out for the entire afternoon.

That unplanned sleep felt symbolic, even if I didn’t realise it at the time.

Since then, I’ve entered a period of stillness. And again—it’s weird.

I’m not used to shutting down at 5pm without guilt. I’m not used to coming home to a calm household where everyone has settled into their own routines. I’m not used to cooking dinner without multitasking my way through stress and urgency. And I’m definitely not used to ending my evenings with a book—let alone being on my third one since that exam day.

There’s a deep sense of gratitude in this calm, but there’s also confusion. My brain feels slightly out of sync, like it’s waiting for the next emergency that never comes. After years of operating in survival mode, peace feels unfamiliar—almost suspicious. It’s as though my nervous system hasn’t quite figured out yet that it’s allowed to rest.

I’ve realised that when you spend years bracing for impact, stillness doesn’t automatically feel safe. Silence can feel loud. Calm can feel uncomfortable. And rest can feel undeserved, even when you’ve earned it a hundred times over.

But maybe this is what happens when a nervous system that’s been sprinting for years finally gets permission to stop. Maybe the discomfort isn’t a sign that something is wrong, but rather proof that something has finally gone right. This quiet season isn’t empty—it’s recovery. It’s the slow, gentle work of recalibrating after a lifetime of urgency.

So for now, I’m letting the calm exist without interrogating it too much. I’m allowing myself to read, to rest, to settle into evenings that don’t require resilience or strategy—just presence. If this is what comes after survival, then maybe it’s okay to feel a little lost in it. Healing, I’m learning, doesn’t always arrive with fireworks. Sometimes it arrives quietly, in routines, in early nights, and in the soft turning of pages.

And maybe—just maybe—that’s enough for now.