Mourning the Living

I never thought I would bury people

who are still breathing.

Not like this.

Not in the quiet rituals of grief

where time dulls the blade,

where memory softens into something

you can hold without bleeding.

No…

I mean the living.

The ones I looked up to.

The ones I loved.

The ones I believed carried something vast inside them…

something that made room for the fragile,

that stood, unshaken, for what was right,

that saw beyond the hollow noise of power.

I trusted them.

I held their words like truth against my chest.

I believed them.

And somewhere…

so quietly I almost missed it…

they changed.

Or maybe they didn’t.

Maybe I just finally saw it.

Because in the end,

when it mattered,

when it was no longer theory or distance or comfort…

they chose a meme

over my life.

And that is a kind of burial

no one prepares you for.

The Day I Lost Them

Waking up to the news

felt like a flashbang before war...

light without warning,

sound that steals breath,

a body thrown into chaos

before it understands why.

A ruling.

Cold.

Deliberate.

Wide enough to swallow millions.

It carved away autonomy

from more than half a population...

not for health,

not for safety,

not from necessity…

but as a weapon,

precise and symbolic,

aimed at women,

at anyone who dared

to exist beyond a narrow permission.

And then their voices.

Familiar.

Recognizable.

Once trusted.

I could hear them.

They understand, I thought.

They’ll stand with us - I had no doubt.

But they didn’t.

They weren’t beside us.

They weren’t shielding us.

They weren’t even grieving

What had just been taken.

They laughed.

Shared a meme.

Turned the wound into a "joke",

the loss into a victory.

I stared at the screen,

at names I still mourn,

contacts that once belonged

to good people.

And something in me went quiet.

Because that was the moment

it finally settled...

They weren’t on my side.

They never were.

Their sides were Left and Right.

But mine was human sight.

We mourn what we once held sacred.

Not a vote.

Not a debate.

Something deeper.

I lost the illusion of understanding.

The quiet belief that decency

was something we all agreed upon.

That compassion was shared.

That my existence,

would be respected,

before loyalty to an idea.

I mourn the moments that felt real.

The laughter.

The conversations that carried warmth.

The times I thought

we were looking at the same world

through... the same light...

I mourn the trust!

I gave without hesitation!

The love.

I believed was returned.

But most of all?

I mourn the person I thought I knew.

Because they are gone too.

And in their place

stands someone unfamiliar.

Hardened by certainty.

Fed by ignorance,

Wrapped tightly in anger.

They speak the same language as me.

Yet I cannot understand.

The same words.

But meaning fails to land.

Something inside them has shifted.

And I am grieving that translation,

more than I ever expected to.

... Betrayal isn’t always loud.

It doesn’t need to be!

Sometimes it is quiet.

A click of approval

on something that harms you.

A shared joke,

that cuts downward.

A cheer,

for a law,

that erases you.

A shrug,

dressed up as humor.

That is the kind that lingers.

Not the intent.

But the indifference.

Grief Doesn’t Wait.

They say grief has stages.

It doesn’t.

It arrives uninvited.

Unordered.

Unkind.

It finds you in small moments...

a name you recognize:

celebrating something cruel.

A memory

that no longer feels safe to hold.

It moves in waves:

A tightness in your chest.

A laugh you remember...

that now feels distant.

A question that won’t let go:

When did I stop being human to you?

Mourning the Living...

I am mourning the living...

Not because they are gone.

but because the people I trusted?

No longer exist in the way that I knew them.

I mourn the kindness...

that could have been.

The empathy...

that was never returned.

The ground we once stood on.

That has split beneath us.

I mourn what might have existed,

if compassion,

had mattered more,

than convenience.

And through all of this

I am learning something I wish I didn’t:

Some people will choose a joke...

over your humanity.

An idea...

over your rights.

A moment of laughter

over your life.

Mourning them...

Does not mean I loved them less.

It means I believed in something

that no longer exists.

And even though they are still breathing...

they are gone.

from who I thought they were...

R.I.P. What could have been.