I Never Let Go, I Just Forgot to Remember

I Never Let Go, I Just Forgot to Remember

Grief didn’t fade. It changed shape—and took me with it.

This piece holds a kind of raw I don’t often show. I wrote it not for closure, but for witness. Some stories ask to be remembered, not revised.

I didn’t hear the screaming.

Not the horn, not the cries, not the sound of my world being split into before and after. I was asleep in the living room, a light sleeper by nature—but that night, I was held in something else. Not rest. Not peace. A trance. Something, someone, shielded me until it was time to shatter.

Earlier that day, I knew.
Not how, not who—but that something was coming. My chest had been tight since morning, like my body was preparing to grieve before my mind had a name for it. I tried everything to outrun the feeling: laughter, busyness, brightness too sharp for my usual self. A strange kind of joy possessed me, the kind that tries to swing the pendulum back before it breaks.

But nothing softened the weight. I knew something terrible was circling. And I knew it wasn’t coming for me directly—but it would change everything.

When I finally woke, I found myself walking into a car without memory of the steps that got me there. My aunt drove us to my grandmother’s house. The street was full. A sea of people. Whispering, not wailing. Someone said, They don’t know yet, and I realized they meant me.

I sat on the stairs.
I watched people cry but didn’t register why.
Until I did.
Until my aunt looked at me, almost bored, and said,
“Oh. You don’t know? Your father, brother, and uncle died. Car crash.”

I was fourteen. A quiet girl. A girl nobody thought to tell.

Sorrow did not arrive like thunder.
It slipped in through my teeth and bloomed behind my ribs.
It made me heavy. Slower.
It tasted like blood and rust and the end of something I hadn’t finished knowing.

You read about heartbreak. But nobody tells you that sorrow moves like a drug—slowing time, bending gravity, distorting your own body until you're walking double: you, and the one carrying your grief inside your skin.

Three gone. In one night. One crash. One reckless driver who will never know what he stole.

And there was a woman who came running.

Not God. Not a ghost. Not blood.
My best friend’s mother. A second mother in every way that counts.
I heard her voice outside—desperate, asking for me.
Not anyone else. Me.
My aunt wouldn’t let her through. And I couldn’t speak.
Couldn’t lift my head. But she came back. Again and again.
She was there every day of the viewing. She held me during the burial.

She told me, years later, that I tried to jump in after the casket.
That she held me down. That I screamed. That I don’t remember.
She said she did it for me.
And for my mother—because someone had to breathe while she couldn’t.

No one else held me.
No one noticed the quietest daughter slipping into shadow.
And so I let the grief change me.

I became angry. Wild. Reckless.
Not in rebellion—but in search of a door back to something I couldn’t name.
I forgot to remember. Because remembering hurt too much.
Because grief only made sense if someone was holding you. And I wasn’t held.

Later, a doctor called it emotional dysregulation.
They said I didn’t know how to process my emotions.
That I’d skipped grief and swallowed it instead.

Maybe they’re right.
Or maybe this—these words, this fire—is my grief finally speaking.

People asked if I ever saw his face—the young man who caused it.
I didn’t. Not in court. Not in memory. Not even in imagination.
But I remember his name.
Twenty-seven years later, I still remember his full name.
I forgot to remember my pain.
But I remember his name.

He died, years later. I heard it through a chain of fading voices.
I didn’t feel vindicated. I didn’t feel peace.
I just noticed the echo: that something else had ended—but not the grief.

That day, I didn’t just lose them.
I lost my loves.
I lost pieces of my heart.
I lost the parts of me that knew where to find safety.

They were my security.
My warm blanket.
My protectors.

And when they left—so suddenly, so completely—something inside me couldn’t bear it.

That’s what killed me.
Not just the loss, but the severing from every tether that made the world feel remotely okay.

That’s when the girl inside me ran.
Scared. Alone. Gone.

It took me years—decades—to find her again.

I searched in poetry.
I searched in silence.
And when I found her—curled in the corner of my chest, still scared, still waiting to be held—
I did what no one else did.

I held her.
I rocked her.
I returned her home.

Not to the house where it happened.
But to the body she deserved to belong to.
Mine.

@notesformysoulmate

This piece is protected—not to immortalize grief, but to honor the girl who carried it in silence and still found a way back.
Elowen stands here—barefoot on sacred ground, holding the memory with both hands.
This work is the intellectual and emotional property of the author. Do not reproduce or republish without written permission.
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