The Day You Died

I remember her.

It was the silence that got me at first. How can death be so very silent? I think the world died with her that day. Even as my mother’s screams echoed out all around me—while she was clutching her tiny body—the silence was absolute. I remember kneeling there, trying to make myself as small as possible. Maybe if I became part of the floorboards, a ghost in a house, maybe she’ll breathe again. As the noise filled my ears, her eyes were still empty. I remember feeling empty too. Turns out, the world didn’t stop, but hers did. The clock’s ticking came back into focus, to remind me of the cruel and rhythmic marking of time that no longer held her.

At first I refused the word. “Dead.” It felt foreign, like a language I had never learned. I told myself it was a mistake, a long faint, a nightmare I could wake from if I just stayed still enough. I sat beside her small form for hours, waiting for the chest to rise again, for the fingers to twitch, for anything that would prove the impossible hadn’t happened. The paramedics came and went like shadows on a wall; their voices were noise, meaningless. She was only sleeping, I insisted inside my skull. Sleeping deeply. Any moment now she would open her eyes and laugh at how worried we all were. The silence lied. It had to. Because if it didn’t, then everything real had cracked open and spilled out.

To unbecome, to undo what’s been done. I’d give anything to drown in her presence again, where every longing finds its home. You were a guest I never invited, yet you stood in the corner of the room, tall and terrible and decided she was to be taken. You came for her, barefoot, impatient, joyous. She was too young to know your name, but you braided it into her hair like dawn braids itself into the morning sky.

Death.

You did not come gentle. You tore the sky apart. The house split open like a wound, and she—the wild one—was gone before I could whisper her name one more time. The air tasted like copper only for me to realize I had bitten my tongue. Her blood was still warm when I found her and so was the blood in my mouth. You had no mercy, just the enjoyment of life gone horribly wrong. You struck a chord but made no sound, just that dead silence again. It was a theft of the highest order, a sanctuary defiled. I hated you then and I still do, most of the time.

I screamed at you in the empty rooms. I cursed every soft thing that ever tried to comfort me. How dare the sun rise the next morning? How dare birds sing, children laugh on the street, clocks keep their indifferent beat? You took her—small, bright, perfect—and left me here breathing when every inhale felt like betrayal. I wanted to claw the sky until it bled the way she did. I hated the doctors for not being gods, hated God for not helping the doctors, hated the universe for its cold arithmetic that decided one small life was expendable. Most of all I hated you, Death, for wearing her absence like a crown. You didn’t just take her; you paraded the theft.

But I talk to you often when the night gets too quiet. I ask what you did with her laughter but you never answer. I feel her, somewhere between ether and ground—hanging like a question you refuse to respond to, because that’s what you did. You hung her.

The shadows grew long, and I tried to rewrite the ending in the dark. I thought maybe if I didn’t say anything, some life would be brought back into her. If I were small enough, invisible enough, low enough to the Godforsaken ground, the universe might forget that it wanted her so badly. I begged you to take me instead but you did not listen, you never really do and you probably never will. You only watched me through her eyes, already glass, already gone. Your gaze used to be a mirror reflecting my own useless devotion, a wide, indifferent ocean that swallowed my prayers without a ripple.

Death, I wanted you so bad… Why did you take her?

I made deals in the dark. If I never laughed again, would you give hers back? If I stopped dreaming, would you return her mornings? I offered years of my life, pieces of my future, every good memory I had left—just reverse the clock, just once. I promised to be good, to be quiet, to be anything you demanded. I lit candles, whispered to the ceiling, bargained with ghosts I didn’t believe in. Take the house, take my voice, take every sunrise I ever loved—only give her breath back. But you stayed silent, as always, letting my offers pile up like unanswered letters.

The world became grey and dull. I remember her hands, how they laid, ungrasping. They couldn’t hold onto either the world or my hand anymore. You killed her. I dreamed of your cool hand against my feverish grief. You hold the echoes of her laughter now, the shimmer where her shadow used to stand in the doorway of my room. A quiet pulse beneath the wood and wind and soil. You are the weight in my lungs that never leaves.

You are heavy.

The days blurred into one long fog. Food tasted like ash; colors bled out until everything wore the same bruise-grey. I walked through rooms that still smelled faintly of her—shampoo, crayons, warm skin—and each scent stabbed fresh. Sleep brought no rest, only replays: the small body hitting the floor, my mother’s screams, the copper in my mouth. I scrubbed the carpet until my knuckles bled, but the stain was inside me now. Grief sat on my chest like wet concrete. I stopped answering the phone. I stopped looking in mirrors because the eyes staring back belonged to someone already half-gone.

Now I love you out of spite. I crave your touch more than ever because it should have been me. I whisper your name like a curse on my tongue, sometimes like a prayer. You come to me in dreams, slick with the same blood I scrubbed from the fucking carpet. You didn’t come softly. There was no light, no hymn, just a silent moment in time—a small body hitting the floor, my mother’s screams. This is not peace, not exactly, it’s just absence of sounds.

The storm has passed, leaving only the wreckage and the cold behind.

If you ever come for me, don’t be kind, don’t make it soft. Do me like you did her.

Quiet and violent.

But don’t worry, I’ll remember her the way she was before, the way you didn’t want me to.

I still speak to you, Death, but the tone has changed. Not surrender, exactly—more like recognition. You are inevitable, impartial, a force without malice or mercy. You took her because time and chance and physics aligned that way; no grand reason, no vendetta. She was light, and you were the dark that eventually claims all light. I carry her now in the hollows you carved: in the way I notice small joys fiercely, in the gentleness I give children who remind me of her wildness, in the silence I no longer fight. The hatred has cooled to something quieter, a companion rather than an enemy.

I keep her memory sharp and bright against your shadow. She laughed like bells caught in the wind. She ran barefoot through grass until her soles turned green. She loved fiercely, without reservation. You could not erase that. You only borrowed her for a while, then carried her beyond where no pain can reach. One day you will come for me too. Until then I live with the weight, the silence, the echoes. And when you finally arrive, I will not beg or bargain. I will meet you as she did—sudden, small, but never diminished.

I remember her. Always.