“Grief does not respect timelines. It moves in layers.” – Joan Didion
My Interpretation: When loss happens before a nervous system has learned how to recover, it does not resolve – it accumulates. & when grief is never fully held, it becomes a lens. Not sadness alone, but vigilance. Not mourning, but adaptation.
Trigger Warnings – Please do not continue forward if you have any. This entire series has them. You matter.
Before I ever learned how to leave, I learned how to lose.
& I learned it young.
My first ghost was Savanna.
The first friend I lost.
We were still kids. Still in the phase of life where friendship felt permanent by default.
Her death was not contextualized. It was not processed. It was simply absorbed.
Another quiet lesson filed away: people disappear without warning, & life keeps moving anyway.
Then came Rowe.
My first love.
Not a “first boyfriend” in the casual sense – but the kind of love that rearranges your understanding of time.
The kind that feels illicit & sacred at the same time. Forbidden, intense, unfinished.
The kind you think you will grow out of – until you do not get the chance.
Rowe died two days before his sixteenth birthday.
& I was never allowed to mourn him properly.
Not fully.
Not out loud.
There was no space for the magnitude of that loss.
No pause in the world.
No permission to be as devastated as I was.
So, I learned another lesson: grief is something you carry quietly, or not at all.
But grief does not disappear just because it is unspoken.
It waits.
Then came Trevor.
Another friend. Another kind soul. Gone by senior year.
By then, death had started to feel less like an anomaly & more like an interruption I was expected to recover from quickly.
Another name added to the internal ledger.
Another funeral without a proper goodbye.
Another loss without repair.
I was still growing.
Still forming.
Still learning what love & safety were supposed to look like.
& layered grief does something dangerous to a developing nervous system.
→ It teaches you that attachment is temporary.
→ That love is something you brace for losing.
→ That permanence is a myth.
Then adulthood arrived – not with stability, but with another fracture.
Diana.
My mother.
Her death did not arrive cleanly. It came after a brutal cancer battle that left behind a complicated inheritance of love, absence, closeness, & harm.
She was both warmth & wound. Too much or too little. Never balanced. Never simple.
Losing a parent is destabilizing under any circumstance.
Losing one when your relationship was unresolved does something else entirely.
There is no clean grief when the love itself was complicated.
There is only reckoning.
& I carried that reckoning forward too.
By then, grief was not an emotion – it was an environment.
→ I knew how to function inside it.
→ I knew how to keep going.
→ I knew how to show up.
I did not know how to rest inside connection without waiting for it to disappear.
That matters.
Because when grief arrives repeatedly – without pause, without repair, without being held – it shapes how you love later.
⤷ It makes intensity feel normal.
⤷ It makes closeness feel fragile.
⤷ It makes silence feel safer than protest.
Then came Beau.
An ex-boyfriend, yes – but more than that, a presence tethered to a time when things still felt human.
His family once felt like mine. Christmas smelled like cinnamon. His niece curled under my arm like she belonged there.
I ended that relationship. I was not ready. Neither was he. I broke his heart.
& then he died.
They called it suicide.
The town still whispers murder.
I do not know the truth.
What I do know is that another ghost joined the others – & with him, another layer of unfinished grief.
By the time Beau died, I had been carrying ghosts for nearly two decades.
Savanna.
Rowe.
Trevor.
Diana.
Beau.
Aunts on both of my parent’s sides.
Uncles on both of my parent’s sides.
Grandparents – again, both sides.
More unnamed friends – every year since my Freshman year of High School there has been a funeral with the exclusion of two years – two years.
That is not “bad luck.”
That is cumulative loss.
& cumulative loss teaches you to love like time is fragile – because it is.
It explains why I attach deeply.
⤷ Why I struggle with abandonment.
⤷ Why silence feels familiar.
⤷ Why I stay longer than I should.
⤷ Why endings hit me harder than they seem to hit others.
It is not because I am dramatic.
It is because my nervous system learned early that people leave – sometimes permanently – & you do not always get closure.
This is the context people miss when they try to simplify me.
≫ They see intensity without understanding the history behind it.
≫ They see loyalty without understanding the losses it was forged in.
≫ They see endurance without seeing how often I had to use it just to keep breathing.
I did not learn how to leave first.
I learned how to survive loss.
Over & over.
& when loss becomes familiar, you start clinging to connection – even when it hurts – because the alternative feels like more disappearance.
This is not romantic.
This is not poetic.
It is explanatory.
The Ghost Years are not about who died.
They are about what never had time to heal.
They are about grief that layered instead of resolved.
Love that ended before it could mature.
A nervous system trained to expect disappearance.
This is why what comes next matters.
Because when someone grows up carrying ghosts, they do not enter relationships empty-handed.
They enter them already braced.
Interlude 2 is not about weakness.
It is about what happens when unresolved grief meets conditional love.
This is where the timeline shifts from loss…
to repetition.
& this is why the story continues.
Xoxo ♡
Whisper to the ghosts. Yell into the void. Just don’t be an asshole.