There are griefs that make no noise. They don’t come kicking down doors, nor do they bring movie-style drama. There are griefs that settle in like a dim light in the hallway: it doesn’t illuminate anything, but it doesn’t let you forget it’s there either.
By Lidia Roselló
HoyLunes – They sit with you at the table. They watch you from the doorframe. They get into the car and remain silent for the entire journey. They accompany you to the supermarket like someone who doesn’t want to be there, hands in coat pockets and a heart that’s running a little late. And you keep doing things because the world has that irritating ability to carry on.
You keep buying bread, answering emails, doing laundry, saying “Yes, great,” while inside you are wondering how one lives with a hole that cannot be seen. And the worst part is that you do it well. You become a professional at normalcy. Sometimes you even smile with practiced technique. Sometimes you even laugh, and then you feel guilty, as if laughter were a sign of disrespect.
Grief is that too: a contradiction with legs.
I used to think pain was spoken. That the day would come when I would open my mouth and the perfect speech would come out: a clean goodbye, an ending that made sense, a phrase that would close the wound like a button.
Spoiler: No.
The throat doesn’t work like that. When the world piles up inside it, the throat becomes a locked door. And you are left on the other side, with a handful of words pounding, asking to come in, without permission.
There are things I didn’t know how to say out loud, and not for a lack of love, but for an excess of it. For fear of breaking in public, of becoming that person who cries “too much,” of someone putting a hand on my shoulder and saying “It’s okay, it’s over now” with that calm belonging to someone who isn’t living through the same thing.
Because grief has little poetry when you don’t mask it: it’s an upset stomach, cold hands, a pressure in the chest as if you were wearing a scarf tightened from the inside. It also has something very domestic, very absurd: you find yourself crying over a teaspoon, a song, a bag of oranges that smells like something that is never coming back.
And here comes the part that, if you don’t tell it with humor, makes you explode: no one prepares you for the bureaucracy of grief.
Because you’re there, trying to exist with dignity, and suddenly the world drops an invisible tutorial on you. As if pain came with IKEA-style instructions:
Step 1: “You have to be strong”.
Step 2: “Stay busy”.
Step 3: “Time heals everything”.
Step 4: “Go out, distract yourself, think about something else”.
And there you are, looking at the manual, searching for the little drawing of how to assemble a chest. And yet, in the middle of all that, one thing becomes clear: grief doesn’t disappear just because you silence it. It only learns to speak in a different way. It seeps into your character, into your decisions, into the way you look at the passing days.
And then, writing appears.
Not as a savior, not as a perfect solution, not as a quote for a pretty mug. It appears as a necessity. Like when you’ve been holding your breath for too long and suddenly the body decides to breathe, even if it doesn’t fit the plan.
You sit down and you start writing—not to publish, not to sound beautiful, not to impress anyone. You start writing so that what you didn’t know how to say out loud can exist. To get it out of your body without breaking yourself in the process. To put it in a place where they won’t judge you for feeling too much.
Writing doesn’t always heal, but it organizes the chaos. It gives it edges. It provides a container for what seemed like a spilled liquid. The strangest thing is that, when you write about grief, you aren’t always writing about death. Sometimes you write a scene in a kitchen, and what you are actually writing is absence.
You write about a trip, and what you are really writing is a “This should have been with you”. You write about a love, and behind it beats that question no one teaches: What do we do with all the love that is left without a recipient?
There was a day when I accepted that I wasn’t going to be able to say it out loud. That my voice, on the outside, remained polite and calm. And so, I wrote it. From that, a story was born, “Ladrona de naranjas” (Orange Thief), which, without intending to, ended up keeping many of those phrases I didn’t know how to utter. Not as a confession, not as a storefront, but as a refuge. As a clumsy and true gesture of love; the way I found to say goodbye without having to “do it right”.
Because grief is also written when you don’t know what to do with it; it is written when the silence is too heavy. It is written when composure no longer serves you, and it is written when you want to say “I miss you” without your voice trembling in front of others.
January is a strange month for grief. Everyone seems to be starting something, while you, instead, are still saying goodbye. But perhaps starting can also be this: daring to write the sentence you’ve been avoiding for months.
Allowing pain to have a dignified place, even if only on a sheet of paper.
I still haven’t found a way to say it out loud, but I wrote it—and in a way, that counts too. And you, What sentence were you left without saying?
#hoylunes, #lidia_roselló, #habitación_naranja,
