The weight of grief settled heavily on her shoulders, an unrelenting storm that refused to pass. One day, her mother lost her battle with lung cancer, leaving an empty space in her heart that nothing could fill. The house felt eerily silent without the soft hum of her mother's presence, and the scent of lavender—the one her mother always carried—seemed to fade with time.
Three months later, fate struck again. A single phone call shattered what little remained of her world. Her father and two brothers were gone, victims of a tragic car accident. The words barely registered as the officer on the other end of the line spoke. It felt like a cruel joke, a nightmare she couldn't wake up from. But the funeral, the condolences, the endless echo of "I'm so sorry" made it real. The house, once filled with warmth and laughter, had become nothing more than walls trapping her in a sea of sorrow.
With every loss, a piece of her disappeared. She stopped speaking much, withdrew from everything that once made her happy. The light in her eyes dimmed, replaced by an emptiness that scared even those who loved her. Her boyfriend Theo tried, at first. He held her as she cried, whispered reassurances she couldn't believe. But grief made her distant, irritable, impossible to reach. He got tired of the silence, of the way she wouldn't let him in. One day, he simply walked away, leaving behind nothing but a quiet "I can't do this anymore."
Her friends followed soon after. They didn't know how to handle her sadness, the way it clung to her like a second skin. She wasn't the same girl they used to laugh with, the one who danced in the rain and dreamed about the future. She was a shadow, and shadows, they realized, were hard to love. One by one, they disappeared, until she was left with no one but herself and the unbearable weight of her grief.
The world outside continued moving, but she remained frozen, stuck in the past, haunted by the ghosts of the family she lost and the people who abandoned her when she needed them most. And so, she wondered: how do you keep going when everything that tethered you to life is gone?