Lost in the Luz River
Month 5

You have been gone now five months.
In April it will be the big six.

Your absence is beginning to settle in,
not like a storm
but like dust
quietly claiming every surface.

There are things I want to tell you,
and then I remember
I cannot.

Stories leave my mouth in the present tense
like you are somewhere listening,
like you still live ten minutes away from me,
or across a room,
or about to walk through the door
and ask me why I look so serious.

Sometimes I start talking to you
before the sentence even forms.
Your name rises in my throat
before reality does.

I choke when I have to say Luz.
A lump in my throat
I cannot swallow.

And when people mention their grandmothers
I feel myself drift somewhere else.

I pause too long.
I go quiet.
I nod through conversations
I am not really inside of.

I cannot even be present in everyday moments
because I am living testimonies.

Testimonies
that live in my bones.

They say grief softens with time.
They say it dulls.

But what they do not say
is how it deepens first.

Grief moves through the body
in quiet ways.

First through the ribs,
then the gut.

A wrenching feeling
that spreads to the organs.

The intestines twisting in on themselves,
the liver working overtime,
the kidneys heavy with exhaustion,
the heart racing
as if it knows something has gone wrong.

The mind escapes for a moment.

But reality
sets you right back into the room.

And if I am being honest
sometimes I close my eyes
and relive the very day you left me.

Yet for the life of me
I cannot remember
your favorite color.

Some things stay.
Others leave.

People say everything happens for a reason.
They say loss teaches something.

But what lesson lives here
inside this absence.

What understanding replaces you.

I will never get over this.
Not really.

I do not know who to run to.

I do not feel a safety net anymore.
I do not feel a shoulder to cry on.

The world keeps moving
like nothing collapsed.

Meanwhile the weight keeps growing
heavier
and heavier.

Like gravity changed
the day you left.

There are things I cannot even explain phonically,
things that refuse translation.

A language made of pauses.
A dialect of silence.

An ache that does not belong to sound
or breath
or words.

But there are things you never got to see.

You never got to meet your grandchildren,
whether they come or not.

You never got to watch me get married,
never got to see me walk down an aisle
and look for you in the front row.

You never got to come to my apartment.
Never sat at my table.
Never walked through my door
to see the life I am trying to build.

And I was never able to show you
the skills you gave me in return.

The things I learned from your hands.
The things your patience planted in me.

I never got to meet your side of the family.
Never got to fly to Mayagüez
and spend time on your island with you.

Never got to use my Spanglish with my cousins
or sit and hear stories from your brothers.

I never got to see your whites and greys
move through the Puerto Rican wind.

Never got to play Bad Bunny songs for you
and actually know the words.

I never got to meet you on your turf.

You lived and died on mine.
And I wish
just once
I could have stepped into yours.

Month four passed
in silence.

My fingers could not bend
around the pain.

The words stayed somewhere
between bone and breath.

But month five
arrives early.

Heavier.

Your absence
finally settling in.

And already
my mind wanders ahead

to six
seven
eight
nine.

Six feels impossible.

A milestone
you will not see.

My birthday.

In all my years
you have never missed it.

An entire life is unfolding now
that you are not aware of.

New rooms.
New stories.
New mornings I wake into
without your voice somewhere nearby.

And it breaks my heart
in quiet ways.

Because every small victory
feels incomplete.

Every good moment
arrives with the same thought.

You should have seen this.

Sometimes I wish I could sit beside you
for five minutes
just to catch you up.

To tell you what the world looks like now.
To ask what I am supposed to do
with all the love that still has
somewhere to go.

So instead
I carry it.

Day by day.
Bone by bone.

Like water in a river
that refuses to stop moving
even after the sky has emptied.

My Luz River.
My saving grace.

Maybe that is what grief becomes.
Not something that leaves
but something that flows.

A river that keeps moving through me
carving space where you once stood.

Flowing past the places we shared,
past the life you knew,
past the island I never reached with you.

Still moving
toward the ocean that holds your name.

Teaching my heart
how to carry you
without drowning.

Tears on this page,
fear in my chest.

Longing and missing
that will not rest.

Heartbreak and broken,
grief set apart.

Ink on the paper,
you in my heart.

All I have left
are my hands to write.

The pen.
The paper.
And a voice.

My mind
to ponder
and ponder
and ponder,

until it nearly
tortures me.

And the quiet ability
to take what is eating me alive
and shape it
into something beautiful.

I never even got
to read you a poem.

But now
I have an angel
and a muse.

And you appear
in every poem.

Whether I mention
a higher power,
a god,
a bird,
or a love,

somehow
you are always
there.

Lost in the river.
Lost on water.
Lost in memory.
Lost in thought.

Lost in your love
and in my grief.

Lost in your absence,
yet your presence
remains in my heart.