After she was gone, the house no longer felt like home.
It was just wood, walls, and the faint smell of dust settling into corners.
Her absence hollowed every space. Even the air felt lighter, as if the house itself did not want to keep standing.
I tried to keep busy at first.
The neighbors came by, offering well-meaning advice.
"Join the gatherings."
"Go to the market, see people."
"Don't sit alone."
I did what they suggested. I smiled and nodded. Yet, when I returned each evening and the door creaked open to nothing, it felt like I had walked back into a tomb.
Grief is strange. Some days it weighed down so heavily I could barely get out of bed. Other days, it felt distant, like fog—I could almost trick myself into believing I was healing. But then a small thing would break me.
Her scarf in a drawer.
The smell of cinnamon from a neighbor's stove.
A sparrow sitting on the window sill, resembling one I had carved long ago for her.
My chest would clench as if no time had passed since that night.
I turned back to carving more than ever.
Wood shavings filled my small table. My hands grew rough again, the knife was sharp, and the routine felt soothing. I told myself I carved just to pass the time, but in truth, I was searching.
I was searching for her face in the curl of the grain, in the flick of a wing, in every faint curve of each creation.
None sufficed. But carving gave me breath when words and company could not.
There were attempts at connection.
A neighbor once suggested I remarry. "You're still young enough," he said.
I forced a laugh and replied that my hands were already full.
The truth was simpler: my heart had closed. The idea of replacing her felt wrong, like painting over an already finished canvas, even if it was torn.
I had friends, of course—people who spoke kindly and invited me for meals. Yet no voice filled the silence the same way hers had.
The years slipped by.
At first slowly, then quickly.
Days turned into months, and months into years.
I watched the seasons change from my porch. Summer cicadas screamed, autumn winds haunted, and winter snow pressed heavy on the old roof. I grew older quietly, without resistance, almost without noticing.
In that quiet, a darker realization grew: I had begun to live not with expectation, but with waiting. Waiting for the end.
But there was one faint light, one ember that refused to go out.
Sometimes, children from the village would visit. They admired the little animals I carved and begged me to teach them. Their laughter was not hers, but it was laughter all the same.
Though my heart stayed tied to the past, when I saw their eyes brighten at holding a small wooden bird, I felt—if only for a second—that perhaps I was still giving something to this world.
Not joy for myself.
But joy for someone.
It wasn't much. It wasn't healing. But it kept me from disappearing entirely.
Still, they were empty years.
Years where my body kept moving but my soul remained locked in one night—the night she left.
Years where each gray dawn felt borrowed, not lived.
Yet, as I close my eyes now, reaching back across these blurred decades, I see that even in emptiness, I still clung—however weakly—to traces of life.
And maybe that was enough.