Brie Nicole Inked

You died, and something ancient inside me went quiet. Not a scream. Not a shattering. Just the soft collapse of a door I had spent my whole life believing might open. Somewhere, some day. Somewhere beyond all the years of locked rooms and unanswered knocking.

I am grieving a shape more than a person. A silhouette. A shadow wearing the word mother. The warmth that should have lived there, but never did. I keep reaching into the dark for something I was never given, and my hands come back full of ghosts.

There was always a maybe. A tiny, stubborn thing I kept alive beneath the rubble. Maybe you would soften. Maybe the past would loosen its grip. Maybe one day you would look at me and see the child who only wanted to be loved. But death has a way of turning possibilities into ruins. It took the maybe and buried it with you.

And I am angry.

Not the kind of anger that burns clean. This one has roots. It has teeth. It remembers being chosen and still feeling unwanted. It remembers learning, far too young, that being someone’s daughter does not always mean being someone’s beloved.

And still, I think about the end. How alone you were. How something in me aches for you despite everything.

That is the strangest part of grief: How the heart can hold tenderness and fury in the same trembling hand. How I can mourn your loneliness without forgetting my own. How I can miss something that never existed.

I keep saying, I’m fine. As though the words might stitch themselves into truth. Meanwhile, I move through my days carrying an invisible funeral beneath my ribs. Coffee. Messages. Sleep. Morning. Repeat. The world continues asking ordinary things of me while something inside me is learning how to live with an extraordinary absence.

You died.

And I am still mourning the mother who never arrived. The arms I never knew. The softness that never found me. The words that stayed trapped behind your teeth. The little girl inside me who kept listening for footsteps that never came.

Perhaps this is what I am grieving most. Not you. Not even us. But the last remaining possibility that someday, you might have become the mother I needed.

There is no someday now. Only this ache. Only this strange, unfinished goodbye. And perhaps I don’t have to call myself okay. Perhaps I can simply admit that it hurts.

That some griefs are not meant to be solved.

Only carried.

Only felt.

Until, little by little, they become lighter than the hands that once carried them.

Because I was a daughter.

I was always a daughter.

Even when you couldn’t love me like one.