• BURN ME •

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Vide Noir ~ Lord Huron

Snow

What is grief? It's a word, isn't it? A tidy little label for something that feels anything but. Most people might offer textbook definitions: emotional pain, despair, loss, fear. Surface level. For me, grief isn't a feeling; it's a place. A black hole. Not some distant celestial body either, but one that opened up right beneath my feet years ago, and I'm still falling. They say grief is pain, and they're right. But it's more than just a sting; it's a gnawing emptiness, a constant ache that settles in your bones. It's loss, undeniably, but it's the kind that hollows you out from the inside, leaving you a shell of who you once were. And fear? It's the ever-present shadow looming at the edge of your vision, whispering that this darkness will never truly lift. Grief is a monster, alright, but not the kind you can scare away with a nightlight. This one lives inside you, a constant, consuming presence. They say it's an abyss, and that's closer to the truth. A damn, bottomless pit threatening to swallow you whole. Some people, the ones who haven't stared into its depths, call it a "path to healing." Bullshit. What path is there when you've lost everyone you loved and are teetering on the edge of oblivion? Who pulls you back from that abyss when there's no one left to hold your hand? Who stops the fall when there's no anchor in your life? The silence screams back at me. There is no one. Just this darkness, this all-consuming void threatening to devour my heart. Death... I've courted that idea more times than I can count. Imagined what it would feel like to finally surrender to the black tide, to let the pain drown me completely.

To simply cease to exist. And every time, as I stand on that precipice, something... a flicker, a whisper... pulls me back. A pathetic little voice insisting, against all reason, that things might, someday, get better. Years. It's been years since I lost them all. Years of waking up to this same crushing weight, this inescapable hell. Forget getting over it; I can't even forget. Not after everything. Help... I should have screamed for it years ago. But no one saw. No one noticed the cracks widening, the foundation crumbling beneath me. And now? Now, it feels too late to ask. So, I tell myself, I'll face it alone. This monster inside, these demons that claw and scream – they're mine to conquer. Even when the silence in my life is deafening, even when they threaten to tear me apart. The only one who truly sees into this maelstrom, who understands the landscape of this inner hell, is Nathaniel. My cousin. He's states away now, a painful distance, but he knows. He knows my demons because he wrestles with his own. That's why he understands how close I sometimes am to simply letting go, to disappearing. Nath was my anchor in the storm after everything shattered. My safe haven in the wreckage. He knows about the addiction, the darkness I've danced with, and with him, there's no shame. Even when his father, in his misguided attempt to "fix" me, sent me to boarding school, Nathaniel and I held on. We supported each other across the miles, two souls adrift, clinging to the lifeline of shared understanding.

Boarding school. Another cage built of polished wood and forced smiles. And inside it, me. Alone again, with the darkness that wasn't just in my head anymore; it was my head. My thoughts weren't thoughts, they were a viscous syrup, thick and black, constantly seeping, oozing through the cracks of my skull. And the aftertaste... gods, the aftertaste. Bittersweet, they call it? Rotten honey, more like. It coated everything, a cloying residue that no amount of mental rinsing could wash away. It lingered, a constant, sickening reminder. Without Nath's calls... without that thin, fragile thread of connection across the miles, I genuinely would have believed I'd have shattered completely. He was... reason? Conscience? Something like that. My own, twisted Jiminy Cricket, if Jiminy Cricket was actually the only sane voice in a world gone mad. And Nath was almost always right, a bitter truth I'd swallowed whole every time I'd ignored him and ended up drowning in some new layer of hell. Like that scene... that life I'd stumbled into. Or maybe it had swallowed me whole. I couldn't even remember how it started anymore, only the gaping maw of it, ready to devour you body and soul. But it... it was a reprieve. A brutal, temporary cessation of thought. A few stolen hours where the relentless remembering finally stopped clawing at me.