GRIEF

Words by Aida Felicitas Rodriguez Barrera 
Art by Flor Cossio 

Grief is not a season.
It doesn’t melt with spring.
Doesn’t fade when the calendar flips. 

It is permanent weather—
a storm that learns to whisper,
a downpour living in my bones. 

Losing someone so close to me
was like the earth tipping off its axis.
Like someone pulled the floor
out from under the ocean.
Like a lighthouse going dark—
and every ship inside me
suddenly lost at sea. 

Now grief follows me everywhere.
It’s a stray dog at my heels.
A ghost riding shotgun in my car.
A second heartbeat, louder than my own. 

Some days, it’s just a pebble in my shoe—
small, constant, forcing me to limp.
Other days,
it’s a cathedral collapsing inside my chest,
dust choking me, and I can’t breathe. 

Grief is a thief.
But it’s also an archivist.
It keeps their laugh in my dreams.
Their voice in my silence.
Their hand in the hollow of my own. 

Every memory—
a photograph fading in reverse.
The longer I look, the more they blur.
But the ache sharpens. 

People say time heals.
Time doesn’t heal.
Time teaches you scaffolding—
how to build around the hole
that will never close.
How to walk with an invisible limp.
How to love and grieve
at the same time,
because one is the twin of the other. 

So I don’t let go.
I don’t move on. 

I carry them the way a tree carries rings—
layer after layer, a record of survival. 

Forever, I am a map of their absence.
Forever, they are the echo in my chest.
Forever, grief sits beside me—
uninvited, but never leaving. 

Because this—
this weight, this ache,
this storm in my ribs—
is the price of having loved someone
so deeply
that even death
couldn’t end the conversation.