Silent Reshaping

 

Way back in college, I found myself drawn to book sales at Centermall, that old mall in Baguio with creaky floors and stubborn echoes. I’d roam those cramped aisles searching for something steady, something that might outlast me. But grief—grief rewrites the rules. It taught me that what I thought was permanent was never really mine to hold.

When loss came, it didn’t just take someone from me. It tore apart the foundations I built around them—the coffee cups we shared, the songs that used to stitch moments together, the streets that once felt like home. Everything I thought was solid softened and shifted beneath my feet. I realized memory isn’t a monument; it’s water—always flowing, impossible to grip.

The silence after the calls stopped was the first crack. It wasn’t just absence; it was a rupture in my story. Grief isn’t a moment—it’s a slow dismantling of certainty. The past I trusted became a stranger, and I had to learn how to live with someone who knew me less than I thought.

I carry grief in spaces and objects. The sweater folded on my chair holds more than fabric—it holds absence. Photos don’t capture life anymore; they expose wounds I wasn’t ready to see. Grief forces me to accept that permanence was just a story I told myself to survive.

The cruelest lesson is this: time doesn’t heal, it changes you. I’m no longer who I was before the loss; I’m a version rewritten by absence and reshaped by silence. And maybe the hardest choice is to stop fighting for what was and start making peace with what remains—fragile, fluid, real.

Grief reshapes everything, demanding I accept impermanence not as failure but as truth. It challenges me to find a strange kind of beauty—not in holding on, but in letting go without forgetting.