Insight of a Kenyan Girl

Grief, when it consumes your whole being, leaves you questioning—why me? No one is ever truly prepared to accept the reality of loss, whether it’s a parent, a sibling, a friend, a partner, or the unthinkable pain of losing a child. The weight of it feels like a cruel punishment, an unbearable burden that isolates you from the world.

The emptiness left behind is more than just emotional—it’s physical, a hollow ache that lingers in your chest. You wake up and instinctively reach for someone who isn’t there. You hear their voice in your dreams, see their shadow in familiar places, only to be reminded again and again that they are gone. And yet, in those darkest moments, people say, “It’s not the end of the world.” He said it wasn’t the end of the world, but what does he know about the loss of something you couldn’t keep but loved with every fiber of your being? What does he know about the unbearable weight of empty spaces and broken dreams?

Even if the person was never truly yours to hold, the love was real. The bond was real. The dreams, the hopes, the whispered thoughts of a future together—none of it was imaginary. And yet, the world treats it as if it never existed, as if something unseen should be easier to let go. But it isn’t. It never is. How do you grieve someone no one else truly knew the way you did? How do you mourn a love, a presence, a connection that only you felt so deeply?

How can they understand? How can they possibly grasp the magnitude of losing a life that was once intertwined with yours? The world moves forward, but for the one grieving, time stands still. The silence is deafening. The ache is relentless. The loneliness is suffocating.

Then come the nightmares—the restless nights where you relive the pain over and over, waking up in cold sweats with the unbearable emptiness sinking deeper into your soul. The shadows of grief creep into every corner of your mind, leaving no space for joy, no escape from the sadness. Each day drags on, colorless and heavy, while the rest of the world forgets. They move on. They stop asking. They stop caring. And you are left behind, drowning in sorrow that no one else seems to notice anymore.

No one chooses to lose someone they love. No one prepares for the heartbreak of carrying memories that will never be made. The pain is so deep it changes you, alters your reflection in the mirror, dulls the colors of the world. Some days, the sorrow is a tidal wave, threatening to pull you under. Other days, it lingers quietly in the background, a shadow that never fully fades.

Grief doesn’t follow a timeline. It doesn’t have an expiration date. It crashes into you in unexpected moments—when you see an old photograph, when you hear their favorite song, when you wake in the middle of the night and remember there should have been someone there. And in those moments, the only thing more painful than the loss itself is the expectation that you should move on, that time should have made it easier.

But time doesn’t heal this. Nothing does. There is no fixing what’s broken, no filling what’s empty. There is only the weight of absence, pressing down, suffocating, endless. You carry it with you, through the days that blur together, through the nights that stretch too long. The world keeps moving, but you are frozen in a moment that can never be undone. The pain doesn’t fade; it simply becomes part of you, as permanent as the love that never had the chance to exist beyond you.