Grim

by D.J. Krimmer

Grief is not sorrow. Sorrow is a guest who will leave. Grief is a parasite—it latches on, it feeds, it remakes. It is a rot that eats away at you and leaves only a husk. It is the weight pressing down on my chest with every breath, my dark shadow beside me, whispering I will never be whole again.

My life was built on discipline, devotion, and love so consuming that I feared it might one day swallow me whole. But never, not in my darkest nightmares, did I imagine that love would be the very thing to unmake me.

And I—well, I am no longer a man. I am aftermath. I am ruin itself. And the aftermath doesn’t heal. It haunts. Ruins do not heal.

What waits beyond the waking life? What sits past the veil of life’s fleeting breath? What lies beyond? Tempus ut de. Time to find out …

Instead, it’s as though I’d been erased so gently that I didn’t even notice until I was wiped clean from the page.

If I disappeared tomorrow, would the world just … keep turning like I was never here?

But time is a shrinking thing now. It used to stretch before me like a runway, but now it folds inward like origami.

But sometimes, when I let myself think too long, I ache for a version of me that never got to be. I don’t need statues. I don’t need my name etched in gold. But I want someone to read my words one day and pause. Just for a moment. And think, She was here.

Some people flinch at storms, but not me. I’ve always loved them. There’s something romantic about the way the sky unravels and demands attention. Storms don’t pretend to be anything but what they are. They come undone in a furiously loud sight. I admire that frankness. There’s a strange kind of peace in it too—the way the air stills before the crack, the hush that makes even the ghosts pause. Thunder reminds me that the world’s still turning. That a force that has seen generations come and go still thrashes and breathes and sings.

“Your father might have treated you like a princess, Rue Chamberlain,” he says as he traces my cheek with his thumb, “but I intend to make you a queen.”