Grief has made me forgetful in a way that is incredibly frustrating.

And maybe part of why it frustrates me so much is because my brain has always been something I could rely on.

I am analytical by nature. I build medical interfaces for a living. I have a degree in software development. My entire career is built around logic, problem-solving, troubleshooting, remembering details, following patterns, and figuring out why something isn’t working the way it is supposed to.

My brain does work.

Or at least, it used to work very differently.

Now I can lose my train of thought in the middle of a sentence.

I can put something down and have absolutely no idea where I put it thirty seconds later.

I can open my phone to do something and stare at the screen because the reason I picked it up has completely disappeared.

Someone can tell me something and I genuinely think I am listening, only to realize later that I retained almost none of it.

And it pisses me off.

Because I know what my brain is capable of.

I know how quickly I normally process things.

I know who I am.

But right now, grief has changed the way my brain functions, and I hate it.

It feels like having a system I know inside and out suddenly start throwing errors with no useful logs.

And if that isn’t enough, my tolerance for the smallest inconvenience is almost nonexistent.

Patience is not in abundance these days.

Something that would have barely registered before can bring me completely to my knees now.

I spill some of my coffee in the morning.

I can’t find something.

My computer, my phone, or my TV isn’t responding as fast as I would like.

I forget something I was supposed to do.

Plans change unexpectedly, and what would have normally been an easy pivot becomes a catastrophe.

Nothing catastrophic.

Nothing that should be the thing that breaks me.

Except I am already carrying the catastrophic thing.

So sometimes one tiny inconvenience is just one thing too many, and suddenly I am standing there crying over something that isn’t really about the spilled coffee, the slow computer, the lost keys, or whatever stupid little thing happened.

It is about her.

Somehow, everything eventually comes back to her.

And then there are the reminders.

Those are strange because they can break my heart and make me smile at exactly the same time.

A song.

A phrase she used.

An animal she would have immediately tried to bring home because, of course, what’s one more?

Something purple.

A picture.

Something funny I instinctively want to send her.

For half a second, I smile because I can hear exactly what she would say.

And then my heart remembers that I can’t actually tell her.

Missing someone and remembering them aren’t mutually exclusive.

They happen together.

The memory brings her close.

The reality rips her away again.

Over and over.

Even sleep doesn’t really give me a break.

I sleep.

But I don’t rest.

There is a difference I never understood before.

My body eventually gives out because it has to, but I wake up feeling like my mind has been working all night. Like some part of me has been searching for her while I slept.

And today marks twenty days.

Twenty days since I heard her voice.

Twenty days since I looked into those beautiful green eyes.

Twenty days since I watched a room light up when she smiled.

Only twenty days.

That number feels impossible to me.

Because part of me feels like I just saw her yesterday.

And another part of me feels like I have been missing her for a thousand years.

This is one of those life-altering events.

The kind where, for the rest of your life, there will always be a before and an after.

There was the me who existed the day before she left.

And there is the me who exists now.

I already know I will never be her again.

And that is another loss I am trying to understand.

Because the really hard part is that I was finally starting to like her.

Me.

For the first time in my life, I was really starting to like myself.

I have put in the work.

Years of work.

I have worked on the parts of myself that needed healing. I have learned boundaries. I have learned to speak up. I have learned that I am allowed to take up space. I have tried to become softer where I needed softness and stronger where I needed strength.

I was becoming someone I was proud of.

Someone I actually enjoyed being.

And then something happened that changed me in a way I never asked for and never could have prepared for.

I don’t know who I am going to be on the other side of this.

I don’t think I am supposed to know yet.

Maybe one day I will find my way back to some version of that place.

Not back to the person I was, because I don’t think she exists anymore.

But maybe forward.

Maybe there will be another version of me someday that I recognize.

Maybe I will like her too.

Right now, though, a lifetime is too big to think about.

The idea that I have lived twenty days without her and somehow have an entire lifetime still in front of me is more than my brain can hold.

So I can’t look that far ahead.

Maybe right now I don’t have to survive a lifetime without her.

Maybe I just have to survive today.

And tomorrow, I’ll figure out tomorrow.

Because twenty days without her has already taught me that grief doesn’t move in a straight line.

It can make me laugh and sob within the same breath.

It can make the smallest inconvenience feel impossible and the smallest memory feel like both a gift and a knife.

It can make me sleep without ever feeling rested.

It can make me forget almost everything except the one thing I would give anything not to know.

My brain can forget why I walked into a room.

It can forget where I put my phone.

It can forget what I was saying thirty seconds ago.

But it never, ever forgets that she is gone.

And it never forgets her.

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes