Dear Jess,

Grief as thick as molasses runs over my tongue and stings the back of my throat. My chest tightens and invisible tears are washed away by the spray off the shower head before they even truly exist. My body is wracked with sobs momentarily then stops. I push the feelings down as quickly as they emerge and take me. Terrified to look at them directly. Scared of what I might see.

There is pain greater than the sore and twisted back that I got used to waking to each morning. There is something more torturous than my sandpaper eyes scraping open for the tenth time that night to her tiny wails for comfort from my breast. It’s a searing numbness that has filled the absence of these things. It’s the loneliness that consumes the night time hours and fills all the spaces around me that are now so empty without her.

I feel a sort of tearing, a breaking off, from where she grew inside of me. An ending of something. A betrayal of a secret alliance that only we shared. My heart aches in a way it has never known to ache and I long to undo these things that I have done.

But instead I stuff the grief down, terrified of this divide that is growing between us. Longing to take her in my arms, carry her to bed and breathe her in once more. But instead I allow this place to fall silent. Dead. At night I grieve what is already gone.

Love Sally Xxo