The Language of Grief

The city never waves goodbye,

just slips behind glass—

blurred and backlit,

like a memory that refuses to explain itself.

You sit alone,

but the seat remembers someone else.

Their warmth still echoing in the synthetic upholstery.

You almost reach for it,

like a fool still calling the old number

just to hear the voicemail.

Grief isn’t a journey you finish—

it’s a language.

You don’t complete it.

You just become fluent.

Fluency means you’ve sat with it.

Spoken it in silence.

Dreamt in it.

And still woken up

unsure of the words.

Out the window:

a bridge mid-sentence,

a skyline half-swallowed by fog,

and that amber light that only ever shows up

for endings.

Grief isn’t loud here.

It doesn’t sob or beg.

It just stares back at you

through glass

and says nothing.

Which somehow hurts worse.

You write poems in your head

you’ll never say aloud—

about the weight of unsent texts,

and how leaving isn’t always

a choice.

The train doesn’t stop for you to catch your breath.

It keeps moving.

Like time.

Like them.

Like all the things you never said

and never will.

And you—

you just watch it all

through the rectangular ache

of a window.

Learning, finally,

to speak

this quiet

language.

A poem by Rachel Smak on grief, loss, and lessons from stage 3C rectal cancer