What Survived the Break
Here I am. 1 a.m. My body is asking for rest, but my eyes refuse to listen. There is something restless in me tonight, a quiet insistence, a realization still warm in my chest. This might be the first time I write about happiness without feeling like I'm betraying my pain. I haven't been okay lately. Life didn't fall apart. Only the part where love lives. Grief found me anyway. It settled into my days, made a home in my chest. I learned how to mourn without permission, how to ache without an ending. So I ran from it. I built routines like walls. I tried to rewire my thoughts, distract my heart, outrun the feeling. Anything, as long as I didn't have to sit with it. I wouldn't have survived this without my friends. They didn't try to fix me. They didn't rush my healing. They simply stayed. They let me spill the same stories, again and again, like repetition might finally soften the truth. They celebrated the smallest victories. "Today, I washed the dishe...