Where the Light Still Hits

“Grief doesn’t have a face. It doesn’t have a color, though everyone keeps trying to paint it black. It doesn’t have a sound, yet it’s all I hear. It doesn’t have a taste, although everything I eat tastes like ash.

Grief is a private language; you can’t speak it unless you’re fluent, and you can’t measure it until you’re wearing it like a second skin. Sometimes it comes as a tide, pulling the ground out from under you. Other times, it arrives in a whisper, so quiet you don’t even know it’s there until you’re drowning. And sometimes, it’s a two-way slap to the face.

They tell me grief has a switch. Just flip it, they say. Move on. As if it’s a pancake, as if it’s that simple.

I was married to her. I am still married to her. But now, it feels like grief is the one who lies next to me every night, and I’m terrified to find out if she ever intends to leave.” Jack said and took a deep breath.

Jack sat on the dark purple velvet couch, the fabric a stark contrast to his own appearance. His white shirt was crisp, an echo of a life that required him to dress for the world, but it was pulled taut across his shoulders in a way that suggested he hadn’t moved much in hours. A button at his cuff was missing, a small, dangling thread he had meant to snip days ago. He hadn’t noticed it. He hadn’t noticed much of anything lately.

Across from him, the woman in the navy dress watched him. He could see her eyes flick down to his disheveled hair, then to the wrinkled sleeve of his shirt. He knew what she saw—a man losing his grip on the edges of his own life. But she didn’t see the reason: he wasn’t messy because he was lazy. He was messy because the effort required to be “put together” was a performance he no longer had the energy to rehearse.

“And what about what we discussed in our last session?” she asked, reaching up to adjust her glasses—a small, precise movement that seemed to emphasize the distance between them.

Jack didn’t look up. He rubbed his palms against the fabric of his trousers, the friction making a dry, raspy sound in the quiet office. “I haven’t done anything.”

“Jack—”

“I practically can’t even think about doing it,” he interrupted, his voice tight. “The thought of it... it’s like asking me to cut off a limb.”

She leaned forward slightly, her posture softening, though the notebook remained clutched in her lap like a shield. “Jack, I didn’t suggest you get rid of it. I said you should fix it. The hole, the dent—it’s just a piece of furniture that needs repair. Why are you so hung up on it, even when you aren’t sitting there?”

Jack finally looked up, his hollow gaze meeting hers. “Because she did. That spot... it’s where she waited for me to come home. It’s where she’d fall asleep halfway through a movie, head pressed into the velvet. We spent our nights there, eating, laughing, falling asleep because we couldn’t be bothered to make it to the bedroom. That couch is where we lived and breathed. So, please, excuse me if I don’t want to treat it like a piece of garbage to be mended and sold.”

He gripped his knees again, his knuckles turning white. The silence that followed felt heavy, filled with the things he couldn’t say—that fixing the couch felt like admitting she wasn’t coming back to sit in it again.

“I know she isn’t coming back,” Jack said, his voice dropping into a flat, hollow tone. He looked at Alice, his eyes searching hers for a flicker of understanding. “That’s the point of me being here, isn’t it? To accept that? To pack it all away?”

Alice didn’t flinch. She adjusted her glasses again, a gesture that felt increasingly like a blockade. “No, Jack. That isn’t the point. Acceptance isn’t about packing her away. The point is to learn how to navigate the world with your grief, not to get rid of it.”

“I will not forget her,” he snapped, the sudden sharpness of his voice causing the air in the room to vibrate.

“And no one is asking you to,” Alice said, her voice calm—perhaps too calm.

Jack let out a jagged, humorless laugh. He stood up, pacing the small space, his hands fisting at his sides. “Then what are they asking of me? Everyone else has already moved on. They live their lives like she never existed. Like she didn’t feed them with her cooking, like they didn’t laugh until they cried at her jokes, like she didn’t celebrate their wins or hold them when they mourned their losses.”

He turned to face her, his chest heaving. “They all say the same thing: ‘It’s time to move on.’ But Lisa wasn’t a book I finished, Alice. She wasn’t a story I could just close and tuck away on a dusty shelf in the bookcase. She was a person. My person.”

Alice wrote in a hurry something in her notebook, she circled it, twice, James saw that, he also noticed that she didn’t try to protect her notebook, she never did, she kept it, but she didn’t hide the fact that she wrote in there for him, for her, Jack and Lisa, or just about Jack or just about Lisa.

“Alice,” Jack said, his voice barely a tremor in the quiet office. “I think I’m losing the sound of her voice.”

Alice looked at him, her expression softening into something finally devoid of the notebook’s protection. “We’ve discussed this, Jack. It’s part of the process. Time does that.”

“I want it to stop.”

“We can’t stop time. We can’t stop the fading,” she said gently. “But we can hold on to what matters.”

Jack let the silence stretch, thick and suffocating, until the room felt like it was shrinking around them. Without another word, he stood and grabbed his jacket, tossing it over his shoulder.

“Same hour on Wednesday?” he asked, already halfway to the door.

“I’ll be here,” Alice said.

“Me too,” Jack whispered.

He closed the door, leaving the silence behind him.

Author’s Note:

Welcome to Where the Light Still Hits.

Writing this first chapter felt like walking into a room that has been left quiet for too long. I wanted to capture that heavy, stubborn kind of grief—the kind that isn’t a problem to be solved or a “pancake” to be flipped, but a part of your life that you’re terrified to let change.

Jack is a man standing at a crossroads, though he isn’t ready to take a step in any direction just yet. He’s holding onto his pain because he’s afraid that if he lets go, he’ll lose the last echoes of the woman he loves.

If you’ve ever felt like the world was moving on while you were still stuck in a moment that stopped, I hope this story finds a place with you.

I’d love to hear your thoughts—did Jack’s defense of the couch resonate with you, or are you already shouting at him to let go? Let me know in the comments. Thank you for walking into this space with me.