God catches every whisper

“You are handling it so well.”

They say it with soft eyes, like it’s a compliment.

Like strength is the thing I’m most desperate to prove.

I nod. I smile the kind of smile that feels like thin ice over deep water.

But when the house grows quiet,

when the world finally stops pulling at the frayed edges of me, I turn off the lights and whisper their name into the dark.

Just to hear it.

Just to know it still belongs somewhere.

Just to prove it didn’t disappear with the life I lost.

Some nights, the whisper feels like a prayer.

Other nights, like a wound I reopen on purpose,

just to remind myself I’m still human…

that grief hasn’t hollowed me out completely.

I say their name as if the syllables hold me together.

As if heaven leans a little closer each time I let it fall off my trembling tongue.

People see the part of me that stands upright.

The part that nods politely and keeps breathing and keeps moving.

They don’t see the nights where courage looks like speaking into the silence and hoping God is somewhere in it, catching every fragile whisper like a sparrow falling.

Truth is…

I am not handling it “well.”

I am handling it barely.

Handling it breath-by-breath,

night after night,

with a voice that cracks when I say the only names that still break me open.

But maybe this is what strength actually looks like.

Not the shining kind that never bends,

but the quiet, trembling kind

that keeps showing up to its own darkness

and still chooses to speak love into it.

Maybe grief is not proof that I’ve lost everything.

Maybe it’s proof that something once lived here so deeply that even silence cannot swallow it whole.

So today, again,

I whisper their name into the dark.

Not to resurrect the past,

but to remember that love never needed light to exist.

It has always lived here,

in the softest, most hidden parts of me.

And somehow…

that is enough to get me through one more night.