The Cost Of Loving

There are days I feel like I am made of ghosts. Not the kind that haunt houses, but the versions of me that no longer remain.

I think about how a life breaks. Not in an instant, but by degrees, each division redrawing the map of who I was. You don’t see it at first. You go on making breakfast. Answering emails. Folding shirts still warm from the dryer. And then, one day, the ground is unrecognizable.

I am not sure which parts of me survived. Memory suggests continuity, but memory lies. The young girl who believed in permanence is gone. The mother who thought she could keep her children safe is gone. What’s left is the life that moves forward in ways I never expected.

It feels less like identity, more like what history leaves behind. Layers built on top of layers until the original is lost, hidden beneath the detritus of later selves.

What I know is this. The story of who I was is no longer available to me. Only the evidence withstands. The photographs. The silence where voices used to be. The fact of my own survival, which feels less like triumph and more like accident.

Psychologists say the mind cannot hold opposites without strain, yet life insists on pairing them. Death beside birth. Grief beside love. The body knows both at once, carrying sorrow and desire in the same breath. Humanity survives in this tension. Mourning what vanishes while reaching toward what remains. It is not resolution but coexistence. A fragile balance nature itself rehearses with every season.

Emeralds are born with fissures inside them, a network of flaws the ground leaves behind. Jewelers call them gardens. What appears as weakness is what makes them singular. I think about that sometimes, how love too is marked by fault. How it gleams not in spite of what breaks it but because of it.

Sometimes I catch my reflection in a window and do not recognize the figure looking back. The face is mine, but altered. Blurred by time and loss. I search for the girl I once knew, the woman I thought I would become, and neither appears. What stares back feels like an apparition. Someone I wear without ownership. A form both familiar and estranged.

What do we do with our former selves. Do we wear them like garments we have outgrown. Do traces of them cling to us. Embedded in the seams. Refusing to release. Or do they fall away, leaving only an impression, a presence we sense but cannot reenter.

Perhaps we carry them in gestures we don’t notice. A tilt of the head. The cadence of a laugh. The way the hand hovers before reaching. Perhaps they surface in dreams. Uninvited. Entering spaces we thought were no longer ours. Or in photographs, where the face is ours but the eyes belong to someone else. They return in pieces. In slips of memory. In impressions that dissolve before we can hold them. We tell ourselves they are gone, yet they keep finding ways back, insisting on a place in the present.

I lost her bit by bit, the light seeping away, dreams smothered into quiet. Each day a subtraction so slight I almost believed nothing had changed, until I looked again and saw absence where there had once been abundance.

Grief is rarely sudden. It works by slow erasure. A gesture forgotten. A laugh that no longer returns. Her eyes had once been alive, always moving. Then they dulled. She weakened piece by piece, until the person I knew was gone. I tried to hold her in memory, but memory faltered each time I reached for it. What remained was neither her voice nor her touch but a distortion, as if the past itself had been rewritten.

There are deaths that arrive as shattering, and there are deaths that seep. Hers was both. The final hour only a formality, the confirmation of what had already been undone.

I tell myself I lost her once, but the truth is I lost her a hundred times. Every story left untold. Every word she no longer spoke. Every night her breath grew quieter. Loss is not a single event. It is a season that does not end.

I was left emptied out. Reaching for what could not be recovered. Holding remnants that cut when I tried to keep them close. I carried her absence like a weight strapped to my body.

To love again felt almost unthinkable. As if affection itself were an act of betrayal. Proof that memory had dulled. I told myself I was not ready, that I might never be. Yet the body argues with the mind. Loneliness is a hunger, and hunger will not wait.

I tried to let someone near. His voice steady. His eyes searching. His hand extended as if reaching could be enough. I wanted to take it, but even that felt perilous, as though touch might undo the fragile structure of survival I had built.

Love after loss is not clean. It drags the past into the room. Insists on comparison. Demands impossible proof. Every gesture measured against what came before. Every silence mistaken for abandonment. Every glance carrying the weight of absence.

I thought perhaps love would repair what grief had stripped away, but love is no repair. It cannot replace what was taken. It cannot make whole what has been broken. At best, it illuminates the cracks. Reveals what still wounds when touched.

And yet something in me persisted. Not hope exactly. More like instinct. The faint reminder that life moves toward connection even when the heart resists. I learned that trying to love again is less about desire than endurance, the willingness to stand inside uncertainty and call it living.

What I discovered was this. I could hold grief in one hand and love in the other. Not equally, not without conflict, but together. The sorrow never left. The fear never left. But neither did the pull toward another body. Another voice. Another presence beside my own.

To love again was not triumph. It was not redemption. It was simply another form of survival, another way to keep breathing when breath felt impossible.

Maybe that is the quiet truth at the center of it. Not salvation. Not restoration. Only the fact that, even in the aftermath, something still reaches. That the impulse toward intimacy does not vanish with loss but persists beside it. This is not a promise of healing. It is a faint thread running through the ruin, proof that what is broken can still move. Can still lean toward another life.

I bear them still. The mornings tear me open. The nights stretch without mercy. I go on because stopping tastes of death, and I have swallowed enough. Survival is not noble. It is not brave. It is the slow drag of hours when you would rather disappear. The weight of breath you cannot set down. It is learning how to go on with blood in your mouth and no promise it will ever taste sweet again.