Anticipatory Grief
About loving someone who is struggling to stay
Sleep paralysis. I’m alive, entirely awake, yet unable to move. That’s how it always starts.
My limbs are fragile, and my chest is heavy with a million glistening wounds. My room is familiar but wrong, like a copy made from memory. I am in my old house in my home country, where the sun shines brighter every morning, where my parents sit at the same dinner table every night, and where my fears settle as glimpses of darkness instead of constant loss.
Death stands at the corner of my room, whispering melodies of grief, songs of remembrance. The mattress sags with memories. My breath is hushed as I breathe ever so slowly. Six seconds through my nose, hold for two, release for four out my mouth. Rehearsed gestures. Thick air, unmoving. Muffled cries, terrifyingly intimate, yet unmistakably meant to be heard.
I share a bunk bed with you.
The song gets louder and louder, and I fear I cannot hear your heartbeat upon my pitiful cries anymore. Your breathing used to be a rhythm I trusted, but now it is nothing but a ticking time bomb. I count the seconds between each rise of your chest, afraid of the next one that won’t arrive.
I hold disdain within my heart for my creator. Prayer tangled with hatred, devotion soaked in blame. I am hypocrisy in its ugliest colors. I am selfish and ignorant in every shape and form. Ridiculous. Socially unaware.
The verdict repeats itself: you are right. We are different, you are right. We never got along; you were always right. I can only sleep when exhaustion overtakes grief, and so I grieve you, yet you are still here.
I despise God for everything that’s happened to you, and I pray to him every time I close my eyes to bring you back to me. To let you see the light that burns so brightly in the face of everyone who doesn’t deserve it.
What I’m saying is that you deserve it and no one else does. What I’m saying is that I hate to watch you suffer. What I’m trying to say is that I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you when you needed me most. What I’m struggling to say, and I always fail to say, is that I love you, and I mean it.
What I want to say so deeply is that death is harboring your soul right in front of my eyes, and I feel so small in my bed without you holding my hand and telling me that he isn’t real. I need you to tell me that you are scared too, and I need you to need me as much as I need you. I want to save you, but most importantly, I want you to want to be saved.
You are the owner of the hands I run to when darkness touches my essence, yet they are the ones that hold me down in my bed, pressuring the air from my lungs, unable to breathe, shakily begging for release, never allowing me to utter the words I want to say to you.
How do you constantly haunt me in my dreams? Why can’t I see you anymore without going to sleep?
Maybe this is my sanction, and I’m paying my penance. At some point, I was facing inwards while you quietly learned how to disappear. I was finding myself and slowly losing you.
It didn’t feel like loss at the time; it felt like growth. Now I know that growth can be a kind of violence. A slow forgetting dressed up as becoming. Unintentional abandonment.
Guilt is seductive, and it is so very cruel. It feels poisonous until I rest within the fact that it’s a symptom of love colliding with powerlessness. It is an escape from a world where the cause of loss is unbeknownst to anyone.
Death watched us grow out of our bunk bed. It remembers us better than we do. The walls breathe shallowly, as if afraid to wake us.
I don’t know where you are anymore, but I am trapped in this bed with all the things I never said, with all the times I’ve watched you slowly rot and excused it for anything other than what it really was, a supplication.
I am now realizing that I grieve a version of you that is blurry at the edges, barely making space in the fragments of my mind. I cannot tell what is real and what is not anymore. I cannot shake off this feeling; I am haunted by failed attempts.
I am fully awake, yet I am still unable to move.
Every night, I have the same dream. You fade without permission. You disappear without warning. Death moves towards you, and you cheer him on as he cradles you and folds you around him like a promise.
I wake up with the taste of mourning on my tongue. I wish for the ground to wolf me down as I search for you in the figments of my imagination and as I curse my body that just wouldn’t move to trace your steps through the fragments you left behind.
I envision a world where I have gathered you up. A world where I am the weight. A world where the air is mine to breathe and yours to share. A world where I am dependency, and not hypocrisy. A world where you see how much I care.
Then I snap back to reality when the mattress folds around me, knowing my collapse is near. My breath is still shallow, and my limbs are still fragile. And you are still slipping, folding into something I cannot touch, something I cannot reach.
Something has taken residence inside you. It has transfigured you, rearranged your face, dulled the edges of your being, and worn your shape.
It watches me watch you. I feel it glaring at me familiarly, reaching out to close the gap between us, changing me too. I have been stretched into something as unrecognizable as you are, filled with dread and numbness rather than anger or rage.
The room grows heavier. The ceiling presses down.
Death is not an event anymore; it’s a presence.
Death is now within me as much as he’s within you.
I realize now that love does not always arrive with the authority to stop harm. Closeness doesn’t guarantee access; it doesn’t guarantee survival.
My body keeps mistaking self-punishment for loyalty. It dresses it in devotion and selflessness. Yet, with all the things it makes me feel, it doesn’t help me save you.
Helpless vigilance. I am awake. I am trapped. I am painfully alive. I listen to the house breathe around us, knowing that next time I go to sleep, you might not be there when I awake.
You call this paralysis, but I call it the heaviness of survival.
To watch a loved one fade while you grow is the only exile that truly matters.
You apologize for your breath as if your lungs have stolen air from theirs. But listen, the guilt you feel is not a verdict. It is the sound of a door you walked through that they could not open.
Do not ask the night to swallow you, and do not silence your own heart.
The dead do not need us to die with them in the bunk bed.
They need us to wake up and live loudly enough that they are never forgotten.
oh ayat this was such a painful read, you have put it together so beautifully - it's haunting, dark and full of emotion. this piece really did make my heart heavy, this piece almost sang the language of sleep paralysis itself in its darkness and grief. i don't have much words, you never fail to amaze me with your writing... i hope your heart finds comfort soon, you deserve the world my friend xx