The kind of grief that doesn’t end. It rots.
This isn’t heartbreak. It’s emotional gangrene.
This poem is for the ones whose heartbreak didn’t explode—it fermented. For grief that didn’t cry loudly, but instead rotted quietly inside your ribcage. It’s about the kind of ending that doesn’t end at all—it lingers in your tissue, in your memory, in your breath. It’s about remembering what love sounded like when it was still gentle, and about the ghost of that voice becoming your silence. It’s physical. It's postmortem. It’s decomposition masquerading as healing.
This poem spilled out of me after I realized: I wasn’t “over it.” I was just decomposing with it. Some losses don’t exit dramatically. They erode you. Day by day. Quietly. Like mold.
This is for anyone still carrying the weight of something unspoken, unnamed, unfinished. For anyone who grieves not the person, but the version of them that once knew how to love you back.
🖤
If this bruised your chest in the same place mine still aches, leave a comment or share it with someone who’s been walking around with invisible grief.
© 2025 Solena Vyhra. All rights reserved.
This work is part of the poetry collection Love Letters I never Should´ve Written.
No part of this poem, including text or visual design, may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission from the author.
For inquiries, permissions, or collaborations, please contact: solenavyhra@gmail.com
Illustration and layout by Solena Vyhra.
Typography: Special Elite (poem titles), Signature (author tag).
Published on Substack via Where Silence Becomes Ritual.
I just wanted to share a portion of something I wrote in a post recently about dealing with grief.
Do not ever let anyone get away with telling you to get over your grief. As if it’s something you need to transition from.
To the depth that you have loved is the depth you will grieve. That loved one has left a hole in your heart, one outlined by their shape, their memories and what could have been.
No one has the right to tell you to supplant what is essentially an integral part of who you are as a person. We need to learn how to reconcile the impact of who/what we lost, with the changed person we are now, because of that loss. It’s called mourning.
Whether it’s from a death; loss of a marriage, or even a job— we need to give ourselves the permission to process what has so deeply affected us; not just discard it in hopes of assuaging our (very real) pain.
(Apologies if this sounded like a rant, but grieving is hard work—no matter how long ago or how recent the loss has taken place). 😒
Wow this is so devastating. Thanks for capturing this with such beautiful haunting words. “It's postmortem. It’s decomposition masquerading as healing” ✨