I thought love meant saving each other

Before the story begins, there is always a death no one notices at first.

And this death, let’s just say it is not the kind marked by funerals or flowers laid gently upon polished wood,
but the quieter kind – the death that happens inside the people left behind.

I used to believe grief arrived screaming.

I thought madness looked like torn clothes, shattered mirrors, trembling hands clawing at walls. But losing someone you love does not always destroy you loudly.
Sometimes it happens like autumn.

A leaf does not fall the moment it begins dying.
It stays attached for a while, pretending the tree still belongs to it.
Still green in certain light, dancing when the wind passes and hoping the branch will somehow remember it enough to keep it alive.
That is what love became after death touched your name.

People told me healing would come gently,
as though sorrow were some patient visitor that eventually grows tired and leaves.
But grief is not gentle.
Grief is a flower forced to bloom in poisoned soil.
It grows around your ribs, through your throat, behind your eyes.
You carry it everywhere until even breathing begins to feel borrowed.
And slowly, without noticing, you begin losing your mind in pieces.

First goes sleep.

Then appetite.

Then silence becomes unbearable because every quiet room starts sounding like their absence.
You begin hearing them in ordinary things;
footsteps outside the door,
a laugh in crowded streets,
the shape of someone standing far away wearing their shadow.

You start speaking to memories as though they are still alive enough to answer.
I learned that the human mind was never built to survive losing the people it loves most. We live yes, we keep pushing everyday as it comes but a part of us dies with them,
and the surviving part spends years wandering through the wreckage trying to understand how a heart can continue beating after becoming a graveyard.

There is a theory about whales.
When one whale becomes too weak and begins sinking into the endless dark beneath the ocean,
another whale will stay beside it.
Not because it can save it.
Not because love suddenly becomes stronger than death.
But because some creatures love too deeply to abandon the dying.
And sometimes, while trying to keep the other afloat,
they sink too.

That was us.

I kept holding your grief with bare hands,
kept diving after you into waters already filling my own lungs.
I thought love meant saving each other.
I did not know love could also mean drowning together.
This is not simply a story about loss.
It is about the terrifying ways love survives after death…….
how it rots and haunts,
how it follows people long after the flowers have withered and the leaves have fallen.
And if somewhere within these pages you find madness,
understand this first:
No one loses sanity all at once.
Sometimes it falls quietly,
like a leaf finally letting go.

Efrain Kashuu is the type of author to wear her emotions on her sleeves. She openly displays her feelings of joy, sadness and grief without trying to mask or hide them. And that is the beauty of it all, how we can all resonate with these feelings because they make us human. To acknowledge the pain, as it means we are alive. And to be completely honest, without our thoughts and emotions, what would we be?