Nobody ever really tells you what losing a loved one is like. Everything in the movies seems cheesy and overdrawn. When you hear the news, it feels like everything is crashing down around you and your brain does not want to take the information in. Like a heavy rain curtain all around you, even if it isn't raining. You're in the eye of a hurricane but it isn't beautiful, everything is drowned and slow motion - a bad dream framed by chaos. In the moments after, when people have sat you down with tissues and water, everything is much too quiet. You try to stop crying but instead end up hyperventilating. You calm down for a second only to remember something good of that person and it knocks you down to a sobbing mess again. You want to shrink until you can no longer be seen. You get phone calls and texts - people have heard the news, it traveled fast. You haven't spoken to these people in ages but now they care. In the months following you forget it happened and then you remember and you relive it but this time you can manage to choke back the tears and sobs. People ask you how you're grieving and you say you're fine even though when you remember it all you cry silently into your balled fist so no one can here. When you're done crying you flip your pillow to the dry side and fall into a numb sleep. Your brain is full of loose threads that lead to one thing. It starts with a simple good memory which leads to old reminiscing which leads to "I can't believe they're gone." When you remember the slow motion feeling of the world ending you start to feel bad. You weren't good enough. You didn't hug them enough, spend enough time with them, say you love them enough, you should have seen it coming. They were just down the hallway and they died while you hid in your room on your laptop like a teenager.