Twenty-eight days ago, I fell.
Blood pooled under my skin and darkened into a color biology invented. Not purple or black, but the shade of something forced to hide its own suffering.
It lingers.
Wine-dark where bone met earth, souring into a moss green, then a jaundiced yellow that gnaws at the edges like something with an appetite. Each stage rotting into the next so slowly the eye could swear it had gone still.
As my bruises decided their color, death entered and robbed me of a life I had known by weight, by warmth, by hunger and sleep. It rendered love down to bone dust and grit, something impossibly large now small enough to be cradled between two fingers.
I was given fourteen days to miss him.
Fourteen days to grieve before another death climbed inside the first and began to eat.
Ash was still lodged beneath my fingernails when suicide pulled the trigger on a second life I had known by voice, by laugh, by the weight of my head against a shoulder. The report lodged in my ear and has remained there, rupturing everything that tries to pass through it. Even comfort arrives jagged now, bleeding, as though every sound must pass through the same violence before it is permitted into my skull.
Nine days ago.
For nine days, every sound has arrived carrying some remnant of a finger on the trigger.
Twenty-eight days ago, they were both still here. I had warmth. I had life. I had the whole cathedral of sound intact.
Now the cathedral is gutted. Every voice enters through the wound.
My heart is a hall after the furniture has been taken, my life stripped down to its walls, each absence making the others louder.
My flesh keeps no ledger of separate griefs — it has sutured them into a single wound: impact, ash, powder, silence, one long violence still threading itself through different tissues.
None of that shows.
The bruise does. It is the only grief allowed to be ugly in public. It may darken, spread, ache under a hand. No one asks blood beneath the skin to be less dramatic. No one mistakes a change in color for the end of pain.
The body dismantles violence by degrees.
Grain by grain, cell by cell, it draws itself back. Without urgency and without apology. It takes what it takes. It has not consulted me. It has never once asked permission to still be here.
It is doing what a body does when no one is rushing it.
It is doing what I have not let myself do.
So I press my thumb into the worst of it, forcing something inside me to respond the way it is supposed to. I touch the wound and the wound answers. It does not lower its voice or translate itself into tolerable language. There is no distance between what I ask of it and what it has lost.
I am not further along.
I am exactly as far as this bruise — still discolored, still tender, still low to the bone, with everything that struck me moving slowly beneath the surface, devouring its way inward, making less of me each day, searching for the last warm place to go.