B
Bargaining
If I rise before dawn
and set the table for ghosts,
will Time delay its hunger?
If I say please
before each swallow of pills,
will Death forget
my name for a while?
In the past, I asked the dark to bend. I begged Time to rewind. I pleaded with whatever gods were listening, to take the years from me and give them back to her. Just a few more days. Just one. Just a moment.
Then, I stepped outside and tilted my face to the sky, allowing the stars to offer some kind of answer. Above me, they had burned. Cold, ancient, impossibly distant and for a moment, I saw eyes. Thousands of them. Watching. Witnessing. I told myself they were hers. That she was still looking. That her gaze had threaded itself into the fabric of the cosmos.
I had to believe in Heaven. Not out of piety, because disbelief had been unbearable.
If there was no beyond after all, then she was nowhere.
***
Humans are obsessed with immortality. We chase it through science, through stories, through the prayers we whisper. The idea of never having to die, never having to grieve, feels like a kind of salvation. However, an endless life is endless mourning. To outlast those we love is to carry a graveyard inside the ribs.
The ancient Greeks understood this.
They told the story of Castor and Pollux, twin sons of Zeus, bound by blood and myth, forged in war and devotion. In battle, Castor was struck down and as his body was pierced by Idas, son of Alphaeus. Castor called out for his brother: Death reaching for him in that very movement, and Pollux left standing in a world his brother no longer breathed in, was offered a cruel kind of grace: to live forever on Mount Olympus, or to share his immortality with Castor, giving half of eternity so they could live half a life together.
He chose his brother.
Because love refuses to exist alone, and the bonds we make in life mean perhaps more than life itself, we pick each other. The Greeks immortalised this truth in the stars. Castor and Pollux, side by side in the constellation Gemini: not Gods, not men, but something in between. Together.
I was not given a choice. There was no God at my shoulder. No divine ultimatum.
Everything just stopped.
I was not a warrior. I was not a twin granted divine choices by Olympian Gods. I was a teenager standing in the ruins of a living room, clutching my mother’s jumper, knowing there was nothing I could offer to change the ending.
I would’ve traded anything. My voice. My future. My own heartbeat. I would have given up speech itself, let every word dissolve into salt, if it meant she could stay. I would have walked on knives to keep her in the world a moment longer. But there was no one to bargain with. No thread of fate I could cut and reweave. Only the ordinary silence of a house that no longer held her voice.
I bargained with the sky that night, begging to find her in the Pleiades constellation, assigning her to light and distance and myth. Not praying but pleading.
An anchor.
A refusal.
My cathedral of longing.
My theology bound of need.
In the wake of Grief, I disappeared too. Subsumed by the sorrow that had taken me hostage. The skin beneath my eyes darkened, and even the smallest acts became unbearable. To sleep was not to rest but to endure a cruel cinema: Death replaying my memories across the dark of my mind, scene after scene spliced together without mercy. Memories of myself as a child perched on her lap while she brushed strands of hair from my face, would replay as I would lie in bed wide-eyed, tears rising unbidden and my chest convulsing as though I were drowning.
Perhaps, I was.
Perhaps, Grief is nothing more than the art of drowning, your lungs filling with saltwater as you slip beneath the surface with no one reaching in to drag you back to shore.
During the seven months after her death, I became somebody who walked with their head down: eyes fixed on their shoes, dragging their soles against the pavement. Maybe, if I moved quietly enough, the world would forget to notice me. I didn’t want to be seen. I couldn’t bear the risk that someone might look too closely and realise I was held together by silence and splinters.
I stopped answering calls. I avoided mirrors, fearful not of the reflection but of what wasn’t there, what I might not find. I wanted out. Out of the rooms that knew her name. Out of the rhythm of days that kept moving forward as if she hadn’t stopped breathing. I wanted to disappear into some quiet place where no one could reach me, and I wouldn’t have to see what I’d become in her absence.
It wasn’t that I believed hiding would bring her back. It was that on some quiet level, I hoped the world might bargain with my absence: If I vanished long enough, maybe she wouldn’t stay gone.
Depression
Pull me from this expiring room,
this cathedral of coughing curtains,
where light arrives pre-sterilised.
A poor player.
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage.
Silence performs its slow autopsy
with gloved precision.
Nothing ever ends poetically. Grief is a transaction gone wrong, with no receipt, no return. I told myself stories, altered endings. Changed them. Saved her. I replayed old conversations like a stone rolling back down the hill: my hands were raw from pushing, as Grief dragged me back. To my disappointment, Grief remains sitting at the kitchen table, legs crossed, patient. Waiting. We don’t speak…but know what it wants.
I planted a sunflower on her grave, when the dirt was still raw ribbed with stone, the earth newly unsettled. I dug and dug, soil grinding beneath my nails. Like an animal, I clawed deeper, desperate to reach her. I dug so that I might be nearer, so that the roots might one day brush against her, caressing her in a way I never could again.
The plant has grown since then. Its flowers have bloomed. She would have loved them; sunflowers were always her favourite. That is precisely why I cannot stand them. Each bright head feels like an accusation, a reminder that she is gone and only the flowers remain. They mock my Grief, flourishing where she cannot; their rigid stems and cheerful petals insist on joy I cannot feel.
On my way to school each day, I passed a garden where sunflowers leaned across the path, their faces swollen with light. Every day I drove my heel into their stalks, their fibres snapping with a muted tear, sap bleeding into the dust.
I often imagined the garden stripped bare; its air emptied of pollen. But sunflowers are stubborn. Their seeds could endure the damage. They would rise again, tilting their faces to the sun as though my Grief were invisible, as though the world itself could go on without me.
So, I retreated indoors. Curtains drawn, light shut out, I found comfort in the cold, in the absence of light. I let the lounge swallow me whole as the fabric grew threadbare at the seams and a rancid scent of sour milk fossilised in its folds.
After she died, I dragged God into a courtroom, Me the plaintiff. Him the defendant. Though I called for help, there was no justice. No verdict that could mend what was already torn apart.
Over time I started to prefer the dark. I chose it over the promise of a rainbow because the rainbow felt like a lie. At least the dark was honest.
In truth, I never minded solitude. It was the only language I ever spoke fluently. People came and went like seasons, but only my mother remained. She was the stillness in the blur, the one who saw me as I began to disappear. Now that she’s gone, I’ve learned to exist in rooms filled with voices, where I drift unnoticed, an invisible silhouette in the backdrop.I built walls. High, soundless. I painted the inside with unspoken things, mapped the contours of my Grief across plaster and silence. If no one enters, no one can leave.
One year passed. But I remained, fossilised in my bedroom. The cups, dusted with decay, and the bottles lined up like soldiers on my nightstand, they were companions that asked nothing of me.
There used to be a photo of my mother and I hanging over my desk. Now it’s gone, replaced by a cheap abstraction from goodwill. On the shelf, stuffed animals grin with their stitched mouths, feeling like mockeries of joy and the bed unmade and sunken, sinks in a sea of worn clothes and unopened mail.
Sometimes, my memory crystallises into clarity. A phone call, a conversation. Her laughter that once wrapped around me like a shawl returns with edges bladed, but I hold that ache close; I let it cleave me open. There is comfort, oddly, in the precision of its cut.
It is late May. I sit in my mother’s brown lacquered chair, the left armrest scarred by a chip, one leg tilting where a stopper has broken away. When I pull open the drawer beside me, a card lies waiting: five poems in her handwriting. Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance. Beside them, faint sketches in pencil.
I read slowly, tracing the loops of her script, pausing at the smudge of graphite where her hand must have rested. The paper has thinned with handling, and its edges are soft, almost frayed. For a moment, it feels warm as if she has only just placed it there and may still return for it. The poems don’t answer my questions. God offers no clarity here. Yet in reading them, in letting the words sink and linger, I feel the shape of her memory returning to me.
Acceptance
Long ago, when rivers shone,
God shaped the dust, and life was grown.
Yet deep inside, a space remained,
A place for love not yet explained.
So, from His hand, a gift was true,
He broke off a piece of me, and gave me you.
You are my rib, my forever start,
The piece God placed within my heart.
Acceptance? That remains the most unknowable terrain. Not a destination, but a desert, where you crawl on bloodied knees for forty days and nights, unsure whether you are being tested or abandoned. Could it be that it’s not peace we come to, but endurance? A covenant of motion. A vow to keep walking even when the stars fall out of order.
Fourteen months after her death, I returned to the café, the one we once claimed as ours. The clock read 6:23 p.m. My hair was twisted into a careless bun, strands falling loose.
I used to order something harmless, something sweet. A blended concoction, crowned with whipped cream, sugared into submission. Coffee was tolerable only when I could pretend it wasn’t there. Tonight, I ordered what she would have chosen, a latte, but I ordered it darkened with an extra shot.
I carried it to our table. Its surface still scratched with the traces of our elbows, the weight of our laughter, our sighs. I sat, eyes vacant, as if my body remained, but the rest of me had gone with her, and Grief drew out a chair beside me.
The last time I was here, I filled this space with panic: spiralling about essays, drowning beneath deadlines, undone by the uncertainty of what I was supposed to become. What if I fail? What if I never figure it out? The questions felt catastrophic – too heavy for the world to hold.
And my mum only smiled, light and unshaken. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “You’ll work it out. I’ll be proud of you no matter what.”
Now those worries felt hollow. The urgency drained from them, leaving only silence. No answers, no compulsion to search for them, just her absence pressed into the seat across from me, where Grief sat sipping a latte that was no longer hers to drink. I reached up, unclasped my earrings, and set them on the table between us. For a moment, I could pretend that she was sitting across from me, wearing them still, the silver catching the café light.
These tiny circles are the threads that tie me back to her. Each morning, I lift them into place, left ear first, then right, the clasp’s soft click; they signal the day’s beginning.
Once, I left without them. Halfway down the street, my stomach twisted. The world didn’t change, but everything felt wrong, too quiet, too bright, too empty. My hands fumbled at my ears, realising the weight was missing. Panic surged, it was sudden and clattering, like the walls of the world had slammed in. I rushed back home with sweat prickling my skin, to fling open my bedroom door. My breath caught as I scanned the room until my eyes landed on them, resting innocently in the porcelain tray on my bedside table. By the time the earrings were back in place, clinging to my lobes, the tension drained out of me in a slow, shuddering exhale.
Every time I touch them, I remember her. Like she is still here, in metal, in spirit.
As unable as the loved to die, for love is immortality.
As Grief sat across from me, its elbows pressed into the wood. It did not speak. Only weighted the air with its stillness.
In that moment, I understood that resistance had been a kind of worship and each attempt to exile only tightened Grief’s hold. Grief was not a wound but a monument, a sentinel testifying that absence could bear the weight of presence.
Now, I let Grief stay.
At night, it brushes my cheek and pulls the blanket over me, only to rise with me again at dawn. Grief entwines its hand with mine as I move through the streets and lingers on my palate with every meal.
I no longer resist it. Grief will always win the war. But in its victory, it steadies me,
filling the empty spaces between my ribs, reminding me that one day tomorrow will not come. Yet, that knowledge carries its own strange mercy.
When the end arrives, I will see you again.
United as stars in the Pleiades.