When we don't allow ourselves to grieve, we end up becoming the grief.

In my mind, you're gone. You're like a bottomless void that never was and never will be, an opportunity that wouldn't have come in any parallel universe. But in my heart, things are different.

I still remember the way you hide underneath your hood when you're embarrassed, or how loud noises used to frustrate you so easily. I remember how you would put on your headphones on the electric piano, refusing to let me hear you play. I remember everything you embodied to me. Desire. Happiness.

Hope.

After everything that happened between us, I think now that maybe hope is made of spilled apple juice, because when I try to cup my stubborn fingers around it, every part of it slips through the cracks and crevices until there is nothing left.

Nothing but the stain of something that once was everything.

And in a way, I convinced myself that I hated you.

In the daytime, I was cruel, and heartless, and a monster to the core. There is not an ounce of sympathy in the cracked, hollow shell that is my body when I turned you into a laughingstock amongst your friends. But sometimes, when the lights go out and I find myself alone, I think I'm starting to turn into you.

I found myself wearing hoodies more often, letting the shadow cast itself over my features the way you always have. I turn down the volume on my headphones and listen to quiet electro-pop the way you always have. I trace my fingers across the piano keys the way you always have.

I don't even know how to play the piano.

Maybe this is what grief is supposed to look like. Maybe the husk of you seeps into me like moonlight to a window when nobody is looking. But then the sun rises again, and suddenly I am nothing again.

It will be like you were never here.