“One Month Without You”
It has been one month since I lost you,
though lost feels like such a small word
for watching my entire world disappear
and knowing I could not follow you.
Your clothes are still folded in their drawers.
Your bracelet and headband still rest beside your bed,
waiting for hands that will never reach for them,
and I still cannot understand how that can be true.
Some mornings I wake up
before I remember that you are gone,
and for those few merciful seconds
I am still someone who has a mother.
Then the truth returns all at once.
It crashes through me before I am fully awake
and makes me lose you
all over again.
Thirty days without hearing your voice,
without listening for you moving through the house,
without calling out, “Mom,”
and hearing you answer.
I spent so long arranging my life around you
that I no longer know what to do with the empty spaces.
There is no medication to bring you,
no meal to make, no blanket to pull over your shoulders.
I used to wish for one quiet day
when nobody needed anything from me.
Now the house belongs to me again,
and the silence feels like a punishment.
I would give anything to be interrupted by you.
I would trade every peaceful night ahead of me
for one more night of checking whether you were breathing,
one more morning of knowing you were still here.
People speak about the first month
as if grief recognizes milestones,
as if surviving thirty days means
I should be standing farther from the wreckage.
But I am still inside it,
pressing your sweater against my face,
terrified that one day
it will stop smelling like you.
You were my mother.
You were not supposed to become paperwork,
a death certificate, a filed will,
or a name I have to remove from accounts.
The mail still comes.
The garbage still goes out.
The sun rises every morning
as if nothing terrible has happened.
Somewhere, a daughter is calling her mother
without knowing what a miracle it is to be answered.
I want to tell her not to hang up,
to memorize even the sigh on the other end.
A month ago, you were still my present.
Now everyone speaks about you in the past tense,
and every was feels like another small death
I am expected to survive.
You were kind, stubborn, funny, and sometimes impossible.
You loved blue and defended Beaker when he was being a menace.
You were my mother, you were here,
and this house still feels like it is waiting for you.
It has been one month since I lost you,
and I still do not know how to live inside that sentence.
I only know that thirty days have passed,
and I have missed you through every one of them.
I survived the first month,
but survival is not the same thing as living.
Sometimes it is only waking up against my will
and carrying the truth into another day.
Tonight, one month after losing you,
I am still your daughter sitting in an empty house,
crying for her mother
and knowing her mother cannot come home.
FRD 2026