I keep losing track of the days since you left, Mama. Grief is weird like that time stretches, shrinks, folds itself into useless origami, and somehow I’m the one who has to make sense of it. I need to check on the internet and apparently, it’s the 108th day. It sounds like a lot, but my chest swears it’s only been three.
This week I got good news—work stuff, the kind that would make you light up in that quiet, smug way like, “Nah, kan mama bilang juga apa..,” even though you pretended you weren’t that kind of mom. And it hit me, instantly and brutally, that I can’t tell you. The thought landed like a punch under my ribs. It stole the sweetness right out of the moment.
I am sorry that I’ve been crying almost every night again. Not the poetic kind. Just messy, inconvenient crying, face hot, chest tight, breath uneven, the kind where I have to keep stopping what I’m doing because my vision goes blurry. Missing you feels like there’s a knot inside my sternum that won’t loosen, no matter how much I breathe into it.
And I don’t know why I keep playing those songs. I play them like I’m poking a bruise on purpose. Sometimes they make my whole chest cave in. Sometimes they do nothing, and the nothingness feels even worse. One verse and suddenly my brain is flashing little moments of you the way you stood, the way you called my name, the tiny bounce of your earring that you wore for forty years. It’s ridiculous how specific grief can be. It picks the smallest things and makes them enormous.
Sometimes I imagine what you’d say if you were here. Your tone, your expression, even the sarcastic comments you’d pretend weren’t sarcasm. And then it hits me, again and again, that everything I picture now is a recording, my recording, looping on demand.
If you can see me from wherever you are, Ma… I hope you know I’m doing my best. It’s messy and uneven and honestly kinda pathetic sometimes, but it’s mine. And I think, no, I hope you’d still be proud of me.
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