When the Room goes Quiet

I was once told that a lot of what I’m feeling couldn’t be processed because I stopped getting creative.

As frustrated as that made me, these people also made me realize all the excuses I made to stop myself from doing something that I love. I held myself back from something I care about.

I started writing because I found it hard to express myself. My love for arts and photography came to life because it was a product of love and support from the people close to me, many of whom I lost over the past few years.

Grief gave me a pause.

And I think this is worth sharing.

If grief was a painting, it would be the most chaotically beautiful thing that I'll ever own.

The streaks of crimson, indigo, and gold clash across the canvas like a storm that never learned how to end. The brushstrokes feel raw and unfiltered that I’ve painted through tears and shaking hands. But somewhere in the mess, there are minutes of softness. There are colours that melt into each other like quiet apologies, like hope trying to breathe beneath the weight of everything else.

There is no centre or a focal point in that matter. My eyes chase fragments. The bursts of neon, shadows thick enough to drown in, then suddenly there’s a golden edge that catches the light just right. And if I look long enough, I start to see the things that were hidden at first.

A feather. The outline of a hand. The tiny signs of life buried under all the noise.

It does not just hang there like art. It holds a heartbeat. There is pain in it. There is love that never got to finish its sentence. But there is also beauty that refuses to be silenced. This painting does not try to make grief pretty. It just lets it be honest. And somehow, in all that honesty, I find a strange kind of peace. Because maybe chaos is not the opposite of healing. I think it’s part of it.

And when I look at it, everything feels like too much all at once, It’s a strange kind of beautiful.

An example of what they call, “Sit with it, feel it. Compose yourself to process it.” I best believe there is the littlest chance you would process someone not existing ever again. Because what does that even mean?

The madness. The undeniable guilt. The unanswered questions. The wishful thinkings.

All of which wouldn’t even matter because something ended.

Someone. Lost. Their. Spark. Forever.

And you meet people who remind you to take a step forward because no matter how stuck you are the world keeps moving.

People talk about healing like it's a checklist. Like there's a formula.

Step one: cry.

Step two: journal.

Step three: let go.

But grief does not listen to these steps. It devours your sense of time. One moment you're okay enough to reply to a message, and the next you're on the floor because their favourite song came on and you forgot they weren’t coming back or the song that you sang along at the funeral randomly came up on shuffle at your workplace and your world stops for a moment and there’s nothing you can do but cry. And you can’t help it.

Because that overwhelming, gut-wrenching feeling happens even in the happiest moment of your life. You can be sitting in a bus and their favourite perfume brushes past like a ghost. No warning, just presence. And suddenly, you are somewhere else entirely.

Your body is there, your smile is practiced, but your heart is aching in a way no one else in the room can see. That’s how grief moves, quiet and uninvited. It threads itself into laughter, into celebration, into peace. Not to take those things away, but to remind you that love like that does not simply disappear.

It lingers. It taps you on the shoulder when you least expect it. And even in the joy, it sits beside you, not to ruin the moment, but to share it. Because a part of them still exists in the life you continue to live.

And maybe that’s what makes it both so painful and so beautiful, the way they still find you, even now.

Nothing prepares you for how loud silence becomes. For how you’ll look around in a room full of people and still feel like no one sees you. Like you're carrying a version of reality that no one else can access. You start trying to do things just to feel something. You rearrange your furniture at 2 a.m. Rewrite your essays at 3 a.m. You scroll until your head aches. You romanticize productivity just so your grief has somewhere to hide.

And the next thing you know, you’re at a bookshop wanting to read as much as you can, but not really.

I think I was hoping that if I surrounded myself with enough words, I could drown out my own thoughts. I thought maybe if I held stories in my hands, I’d feel less empty. Like I could borrow someone else’s meaning until I found my own again. I imagined the books would make me feel like I belong somewhere. Somewhere quiet where a community of thinkers and feelers, people who understood what it meant to carry invisible weight were existent. But the truth is, they don’t really exist. No one talks about the madness in between the process.

I bought 10.

I kept convincing myself that maybe the books would build a bridge between who I was before the loss and who I was supposed to become after. That maybe, if I kept stacking them, the answers would start to take shape.

Because the thing about grief is you completely lose who you wanted to be before all of it. The goal would never make sense if the people you lost are not a part of it anymore. Everything else doesn’t make sense, every move isn’t calculated, every part of excitements becomes a thought of “if they were here, they would’ve loved this.”

But I guess that’s the beauty of grief. Not in the breaking, but in the wandering. In losing yourself entirely just to stumble upon a new road. One that is carved despite the loss, but because of it. One you now walk with every piece of them stitched quietly into your steps. A future that is completely yours and dedicated to them.

Grief doesn’t end. It evolves. And somehow, that’s how you begin again.

If I could describe it, I would say, grief is strange. It is messy and confusing and somehow beautiful in ways you never expected. That sounds completely insane, but hear me out.

It does not show up like a clear storm you can wait out. It is more like a slow shifting tide that pulls you under and then lets you breathe again over and over. It makes you feel like you are losing your grip on yourself and maybe you are but maybe that is what you needed.

Because in that losing you start to find new pieces you did not know were there. Parts of yourself softened, stretched, changed by the weight of missing someone so deeply. Grief teaches you how to carry a love that is bigger than presence, how to keep someone alive in the small moments, the quiet spaces, the in-between days.

It is heartbreaking, but I think it’s a lovely kind of heartbreak because it is also a kind of a love story. The way you learn to live with the absence, the way your heart rearranges itself to hold both sorrow and hope at once. And in that strange, tangled space, there is a kind of quiet strength. A knowing that even though things will never be the same you can keep walking forward, carrying them with you in every breath.

Grief does not have an ending. It changes shape. It becomes part of who you are. It’s the beautiful hard truth of learning to love beyond loss.