Untitled.

"Even if you are not ready for the day, it cannot always be night."

I’ve been up since 5:20, though I would rather not be and I lie patiently on the bed, still, unmoving. I’m waiting for the muezzin at 5:30, not because I’m devout, but because the voice has become a clock of sorts, reminding me that readiness is irrelevant to time and night yields to day, always.

I count the seconds in my head, sixty makes a minute, ten makes a ritual.

Fifty-eight, fifty-nine, sixty.

The mind finds strange ways to hold itself together.

By 5:30, the silence is swollen. I open one eye, as if afraid I might startle the dawn. No sound. My chest tightens. I check my phone, 5:30, sharp. I frown, certain I must’ve drifted off in thought, but my mind feels too alert for that. Maybe I missed it. I close my eyes again and let out a slow sigh.

Hmm

Then it comes.

The voice stretched, steady, trembling slightly at the edges and climbs into the room through the open window. A sound that seems to rise from the earth itself. I didn’t realize I was holding my breath until the last note fades, dissolving into the morning like incense smoke. I glance at my phone again. 5:35am.

Five minutes late.

Funny how even a delay in ritual feels like loss.

The sound leaves behind a quiet that doesn’t comfort. The air settles, heavy and familiar. I let my thoughts wander, as they always do, toward the things that have happened lately. The deaths.

Our neighbor, who had just begun the long sentence of marriage, stopped mid-word. His wife, with eyes refusing to focus, walks the compound like she’s looking for something she dropped and can’t remember where. There’s a hollow to her steps, and something almost sacred about her confusion like she’s speaking a language only the bereaved understand.

Then there’s my friend’s sister. The news of her death came like a careless whisper, brief, but not gentle. But grief doesn’t need volume to be loud. My aunt's only child just died, and there's no consolation that ever be enough, not in this world or the afterlife. And then the others faces on the news, families erased in the latest killings. Even Mom’s remembrance, three Sundays ago.

Some absences feel ancient, yet they still sting like fresh wounds.

Grief has many doors, and somehow, I keep finding new ones.

In a way, some of us are grieving something. Someone. Some version of ourselves that didn’t survive the years intact.

A place that doesn’t exist anymore.

A certainty that’s gone missing.

Something we outgrew before we were ready.

But knowing that we all grieve doesn’t make it easier to reach across the gap because grief is a private language. Empathy doesn’t always translate; sometimes it stops at the edge of understanding, unable to cross into experience. There’s always a distance, invisible but wide, between empathy and experience.

And maybe that’s the cruelest part, how easy it is to stand at the edges of other people’s pain, to nod and sigh, to offer the right words at the right pitch, and still not feel it. You can watch someone drown every day and never understand the taste of salt.

Grief, when it’s not yours, is just a sound, the muffled cry behind a closed door, the quiver in someone’s “I’m fine.” You can listen, even care deeply, but you can never step fully into the pain that belongs to someone else. It is a room you can look into but never enter.

And when it is yours, when it finally arrives, you understand. That things don’t get easier. They just change shape.

The grief softens, maybe, but it never leaves. It becomes quieter, more polite, learning when to show up and when to wait in the hallway. It hums beneath laughter, curls up at your feet during conversations, hides in the folds of small talk.

You learn to live around it, to hang your joy carefully, so it doesn’t brush against the edges of your sorrow. You learn the art of half-smiles. You learn how to keep breathing without asking why.

Grief is not something you conquer. It’s something you fold into your mornings the way you fold bedsheets, the way you fold silence. You live beside it, sometimes within it. It becomes a room in your house, one you don’t always enter, but whose light never truly goes off. And I realize: grief belongs to those who carry it. You can touch it, but it never really transfers.

No one feels enough for the one who’s living it. You can stand beside them, hold their silence, but you’ll never feel the exact texture of their loss.

The call to prayer has ended and the room is quiet again, but it is brighter this time.

The hum of the fan joins the city’s sigh, generators coughing awake, birds cutting through the pale sky.

I sigh wearily, lying there, still unmoving. And I realize, everything hums. Even grief. Especially grief.