Page 21 of Remain

The ache spreads slow and deep, the kind that doesn’t knock you over but never really lets you stand straight again.

The kitchen is worse.

Her mug is still by the sink, where I left it earlier, where Aunt Carol must have been using it to hydrate through all of her own sense of loss after losing her sister. The sight of it hits me again like grief is learning new angles against my defences. I pick it up this time, turning it in my hands. The chip catches my thumb.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper, though I don’t know what for. Everything, maybe. Anything.

I move through the house room by room, touching things lightly, like the back of a chair, the edge of the counter, the doorframe where my height is still penciled in from years ago.

Each mark feels like proof of life. Each one feels like a goodbye.

In the hallway, I stop outside my childhood bedroom. I tell myself I don’t have to go in but I know I must. Shadows can only stay in the dark for so long until they come into the light. I open the door.

The room is stripped down to its bones. The bed gone. The posters peeled off the walls. What’s left is the faint outline of who I used to be in this house with nail holes, and a pale square where a bulletin board once hung.

On the floor sits many boxes but one stands out.

Sav.

Just my name.

My hands shake as I lift the lid.

Inside are things I recognize instantly and things I forgot ever existed like concert tickets, old journals, and a scarf Ithought I lost years ago. On top of it all is a folded piece of paper with my handwriting.

Things I’ll come back for.

I sink down onto the floor, the motion clumsy and ungraceful, like my body gives up before my pride does.

I never did. I never came back.

The truth lands slowly, cruel in its patience. I didn’t come back for the holidays or the things that mattered. I left, and I kept leaving, convincing myself that distance was the same as survival.

The house creaks around me, familiar and foreign all at once, like it’s clearing its throat. I press my palm to the floor, the wood cool beneath my skin, and breathe until the room stops tilting.

Tomorrow, this place won’t be mine. Tomorrow the boxes will be gone, and the rooms emptied of proof that we ever lived here the way we did.

Tonight the house still knows me. So I sit there, right in the middle of everything I avoided. The half-packed boxes. The memories stacked too close together. The grief I kept telling myself I’d deal with later. I let it all spill in at once, messy and wildly unfair.

It hurts but it also feels important and honest.

I stop trying to outrun the breaking and let myself feel it with a knowing some things don’t shatter you all at once. They wear you down quietly, over years.

I’ve been breaking for a long time.

Tonight, I finally stop pretending otherwise.

I don’t hearthe car pull up.

I only realize I’m not alone anymore when the front door opens and closes softly, the sound careful in the way only one person in my life ever is.

“I brought soup,” Aunt Carol calls from the kitchen. “It’s your favorite too. Chicken noodle with leeks, just like you taught me. You don’t have to eat it, but it exists. Oh and so do I, in case you forgot.”

She’s trying to be funny but it just doesn’t land right now. Even though I usually love it, I have no capacity for her humor.

I’m sitting on the floor of my childhood bedroom, back against the wall, surrounded by open boxes and half-sorted versions of my life. My eyes burn. My chest feels hollowed out, scooped clean and left that way.

“You didn’t have to come,” I declare, because saying thank you feels too vulnerable.