“When the Dead Matter More”

 There’s a kind of loneliness

that doesn’t come from being alone.
It comes from standing beside someone
whose heart is somewhere else—
buried with someone they lost.

You can feel it in the silence.
The way their eyes glaze over,
looking through you
to a memory you can’t touch.
You try to hold them,
but they’re already holding ghosts.

And it hurts—
to love someone
who keeps their tenderness
locked inside a tomb.
To compete with a memory
that never fades,
because the dead don’t disappoint,
the dead don’t argue,
the dead stay perfect.

You start to wonder
if anything you do will ever be enough.
If your laughter can ever echo
louder than a ghost’s name.
If your heartbeat
can ever outshine the silence
they still light candles for.

You tell yourself to understand—
grief doesn’t leave when you want it to.
But sometimes,
being the living
feels like being invisible.
Like you’re breathing beside a shadow
that keeps calling their name,
not yours.

And so you learn to whisper your love
around their pain.
To make room
for both the memory and the moment—
even when it costs you pieces of yourself.

Because there’s no easy way to exist
in someone’s afterlife.
To be the warmth
standing next to their cold.

And maybe, one day,
they’ll see you—
not as the person who isn’t them,
but as the one who stayed.
The one who chose them
even when they couldn’t fully choose you.

Until then,
you love quietly,
you breathe softly,
and you hope—
that one day,
the living
will matter too.