It’s June, and the grief is sweating through my skin.

This is a bit different from what I usually post but here we are. It's June. What can you do.

Jun 05, 2026

It’s June, and the grief is sweating through my skin. The heat has absolutely no manners - it just arrives, sits down, refuses to leave, same as loss does. I find myself opening the fridge for reasons I forget. I keep starting sentences and leaving them. The garden is doing all the usual indifferent blooming, all that colour nobody asked for - watching all of that life just going ahead while I watch.

There’s a version of me I keep meaning to get back to. I’m not sure when I last saw her. I think she had better posture, and I think she had the heart to return calls. I have all these tabs open that have been there for weeks, and closing them feels as if I’d be giving up on something (though I couldn’t tell you what).

It feels like this to be stuck: not anything dramatic… just, tabs. Dishes that are almost done. A life that is on hold - almost happening. I move through each hour like I’m slightly behind it. Like the day already happened and I’m catching up to the idea of it.

And yet. There’s something ahead of me that I can actually see for once. Not a vague shape, but something real. Something that has my name engraved into it. And I am running toward it, I am, with everything I’ve got. Except everything I’ve got is not everything. Because part of it - a very real, irreplaceable part - I left on another continent.

It’s still there. In a timezone I do the maths for without thinking and in voices that know the oldest versions of the real me, and the versions that exist nowhere else. In a kitchen that smelled like something I will spend the rest of my life failing to describe.

So I run toward the future with most of my heart - which is still a lot. Which is sometimes enough. Some days this feels like a miracle, and other days feels like a wound I’ve decided I have to jog with.

I am building something. I know I am… but building is loud and slow and the materials are unfamiliar and sometimes I put something down and stand back and think - who is this for? And then I remember: it is for the part of me that chose this. The part that looked at a map and said there. The part that keeps waking up and deciding, still, yes. Still.

The missing piece of myself doesn’t go away. I’ve stopped waiting for it to. It just means I carry the future in one hand and the past in the other, and sometimes I realise I need both hands for something else and I don’t know where to put either one down for a moment.

But regardless, I keep putting one foot in front of the other. Not gracefully, and certainly not with any particular conviction most mornings. I drag my feet - literally - across floors, across weeks, across versions of plans I’ve made and remade. There is nothing poetic about this. It just is what it is.

Forward anyway, towards what I want. Slowly. In shoes that are battered and tired.