Somewhere beneath the city, a woman whispered to the world, two hundred years after her death.
Her words threaded through the silence like a signal waiting to be found, fragile but unbroken. Those who heard it would never be the same.
Journal Entry – May 10th, 2025
Grief doesn't fade. It sharpens. Softens. Then it waits in the shadows, patient and unrelenting, tangling itself around memories until it speaks in my handwriting—letters I don't remember writing. Maybe writing is the only way to keep from disappearing with him.
Maybe these pages are the only place where the version of me that still remembers how to love can survive.
But some days, it feels like grief writes me, not the other way around.
Everywhere I looked, he was still there.
His desk is still a map of his mind—papers scattered like constellations I could never decipher. He spoke in science; I spoke in poetry. And there it sits: the green snake mug, coffee-stained and eternal. The same mug that made me laugh the day we met, its emblem from a favorite story we both loved. A simple mug, yet it revealed so much before he ever spoke a word.
The day came to me so vividly.
I sat up at my table. I had been writing my poetry at Boffee's, a bookstore and coffee shop. I stepped into the aisle, having bumped into a tall, handsome stranger. He had his dark brown hair cut short and a clean-shaven face. The moment I saw him, I laughed uncontrollably. Poor guy probably thought it was at him.
"What is so funny?" He asked me, and I just couldn't stop.
"I laugh when I'm embarrassed," and then I noticed something in his hands.
"I hope your mug just means you're intelligent and ambitious in a good way," I said immediately after.
Then he looked down at his mug and returned the smile before asking my name.
"Hasley," I said before turning away,
"Wait," He said quickly, and I turned my head back in his direction. "I'm Emerson. Would you care to have some coffee with me?" Lifting his empty cup, he hints that he could use a refill.
I smiled, "Sure, why not?"
And we have been inseparable since that day.
Now it just hurts to remember it.
It sits there, as if waiting for him to pick it up again, suggesting I should leave it untouched to avoid shattering the memory.
A memory I didn't want shattered, but didn't want around either.
The mug's handle bore the faint wear of years spent in his hands. Sometimes I imagined it still held the warmth of his last cup, the ghost of steam rising if I looked closely enough.
Sometimes I forget he's gone until I catch myself reaching for him—mid-thought, mid-laugh, mid-life.
I haven't touched his computer. I still feel like he might walk through the door and sit down like nothing ever changed.
Books are still piled around the monitor, and I miss our club of two.
I hadn't even finished that month's current read, the month he died. It was about a girl with a yellow-eyed nightmare trapped in her mind.
My husband really got involved in this one. He said he liked the nightmare and that he had to have been misunderstood.
I couldn't bring myself to finish it, so it sits covered at my bedside table.
I could almost hear his voice in the silence, low and animated as he argued about the book's ending, his hands always moving when he got passionate about a story. The memory struck so vividly that for a heartbeat, I almost answered him out loud.
I still form sentences meant only for him, inside jokes, passing thoughts. They haunt me more than any nightmare ever could.
I tilted my head, hoping to catch a glimpse of something else, but it didn't matter where I looked.
The shelf of anime seasons waits, like we might still binge-watch them on a Sunday, and I'm reminded of why I stay in bed all day.
I think about moving, but I can't. This house is a mausoleum, but leaving it would feel like abandoning him all over again. I was more co-dependent than I ever admitted—even to myself. Now every wall, every creaking floorboard, reminds me of just how much of me was stitched to him.
The house didn't just hold memories—it seemed to breathe them. Every creak of the floorboards felt like a sigh, every shadow a ghost I couldn't see. I lived among relics of a life I couldn't let go of, and they were slowly swallowing me whole.
Most days, I stayed hidden in the guest room since the hospital after the accident.
But today was different.
Today would've been our fifteenth anniversary.
So, I slept in our room last night, but to say it was peaceful would have been a lie.
I didn't get up this morning out of a need for survival.
I got up because the silence felt too loud—because lying still had started to feel like forgetting.
And he didn't deserve to be forgotten.
No matter how painful.
And I didn't want to become the kind of person who could forget him.
I pulled myself out of bed, fighting the grief like a weighted blanket pinning me down.
The cold floor sent a jolt through my heels.
It felt deserved.
I didn't look in the mirror. I wasn't ready to see the woman left behind.
I just reached for the hoodie with the faded symbol from our favorite anime.
It hung by the door like a shadow of him. When I slipped it over my head, his scent wrapped around me, collapsing the distance between now and the moment he last wore it. My knees nearly buckled. For a heartbeat, it was as if he stood behind me, arms wrapped around me. The illusion faded, leaving only me—and the weight of what wasn't there.
I kept going, my feet sliding against the hardwood floors as I moved through the hallway, slowly and quietly, like the house might wake up if I made too much noise.
The emptiness was unsettling, so I transitioned to tiptoeing around like prey, hoping the shadows haunting me would miss today.
The canvases were veiled in dust, settled like silence waiting for a moment that never came. A moment where I was ready to clean, but I didn't want to change anything, not even the smallest speck of dust that might have been from him.
Some of the canvases were sketches he'd made late at night, strange diagrams mixed with half-finished formulas I never understood. I'd once teased him about keeping his art and science separate. Now, they felt like pieces of a puzzle I was never meant to solve.
I was trying to stay strong, even though strength was hard to come by, but I needed it more than ever today.
I told myself I'd walk. Bring flowers to his grave.
Emerson's grave.
His name even haunted me, but I needed to learn to say it again, or at least think it.
I thought I might even read to him, if my voice held steady.
If I could borrow enough of myself from before.
He'd like that, I think—the old Emerson.
The one who believed words had weight, even after they were gone.
I grabbed a book from the round wooden coffee table without looking.
We had books everywhere in our small, quaint home, and it didn't matter which one—he loved them all like they were pieces of truth.
And if I had stopped to think about it, I might have crawled back under the covers.
I needed to keep pushing forward for him. For me.
The sky outside was the color of grief, muted and breathless, like the world had paused in mourning.
Then a distant rumble of thunder rolled low across the horizon, too soft to promise rain but loud enough to make my chest tighten.
The air clung to me, damp and heavy, the kind of stillness that comes before the rain. The trees swayed faintly, their new leaves dulled under the gray, as if even spring had lost its voice.
The outside was bigger than the inside. We enjoyed having a lot of land to explore outside, where we could read near the trees, while keeping them just far enough away from the house.
The driveway stretched ahead of me, quiet and waiting. Each step pulled me further from the life I once knew, the soft grit beneath my shoes a reminder that some paths only lead away.
It never felt long when he was waiting at the end. Now, it felt endless—like walking across a thread pulled too tight, ready to snap with one wrong step.
I finally reached it, and it had felt like an accomplishment I didn't know I needed to reach. But for a moment, it felt good.
The mailbox door groaned as I opened it, a sound far too loud for the quiet street.
I found a single envelope in the mailbox.
No return address. No name.
Just the weight of paper and a letter waiting inside.
I glanced over my shoulder without meaning to, skin prickling, but the street was empty. My breath caught, and for a moment, I imagined someone watching from the tree line, just out of sight. Nothing moved, but the feeling didn't leave.
Maybe the letter had been sitting there for days, just waiting for me to be ready.
Though Something about it felt wrong before I even touched it.
The paper seemed to hum, as if it carried a heartbeat of its own.
But grief makes you reckless in strange ways. It dares you to hope, to feel something.
I didn't know if it would save me—or ruin me.