In the days of early grief, the pull towards the being you lost is still there. It pulls at your heart but has nowhere to go. It is a ghost. A ghost of habits and rituals, a ghost of familiarity, who feeds on unmoored love – another name for grief. 

Like a phantom limb in your life, it makes you feel, it makes you want, it can almost make you speak. You stop yourself, of course, because there’s nothing there, nothing left. Nobody to check on, nobody to touch, nobody to look at. Nobody to love you back.

In the days where grief is young, where reality is ripped apart from what is true, the truth inside us hangs on to its last shuddering breaths, unwilling to fold into reality and offer peace. For truth is made of actions and feelings more than words or ideas, and keeps trying to draw us towards the one who is gone. The presence of absence takes up all the space.

The pull is sometimes so strong that we hear them speak or think we have seen them. These ghosts are within us, like rogue processes that have lost their purpose but will not stop running. 

They make for strange times, which don’t last that long. Sometimes a few weak echoes follow you down the weeks or even the years, but few and far between, nothing like those first few days in a foreign life. The life without.