After she was gone, the house no longer felt like home.
It was just wood. Walls. The faint smell of dust settling into corners.
Her absence hollowed every corner. Even the air seemed thinner, like the house itself no longer wished to keep standing.
I tried to keep busy at first.
The neighbors came by, offering endless well-meaning advice.
"Join the gatherings."
"Go to the market, see people."
"Don't sit alone."
I did as they said. I smiled. I nodded. And yet, when I returned each evening and the door creaked open to nothing, it felt as though I had walked back into a tomb.
Grief is strange. Some days it weighed down so heavily I could barely rise from bed. Other days, it felt distant, like fog, I could almost fool myself into believing I was healing. But then a small thing would break me.
Her scarf in a drawer.
The smell of cinnamon from a neighbor's stove.
A sparrow sitting on the window sill, the shape of one I had carved long ago for her.
And my chest would clench as if no time had passed since that night.
I turned back to carving more than ever.
Wood shavings covered my small table. My hands grew rough again, the knife sharp, the routine soothing. I told myself it was just to pass the hours, but in truth, I was searching. Searching for her face in the curl of grain, in the flick of a wing, in every faint curve of each creation.
None sufficed. But carving gave me breath when words and company couldn't.
There were attempts at connection.
A neighbor once suggested I remarry. "You're still young enough," he said.
I forced a laugh and replied that my hands were already full.
The truth was simpler: my heart had closed. The idea of replacing her felt sacrilegious, like painting over a canvas already finished, even if torn.
I had friends, of course, men and women who spoke kindly, who invited me to meals. Yet no voice filled the silence the same way hers had.
The years slipped.
At first slowly, then quickly.
Days into months, months into years.
I watched the seasons change from my porch. Summer cicadas screaming, autumn winds haunting, winter snow pressing heavy on the old roof. I grew older quietly, without resistance, almost without noticing.
And in that quiet, a darker realization grew: I had begun to live not with expectation, but with waiting. Waiting for the end.
But there was one faint salvation, one ember that refused to go out.
Sometimes, children from the village would visit. They admired the little animals I carved and begged me to teach them. Their laughter was not hers, but it was laughter all the same.
And though my heart stayed tethered to the past, when I saw their eyes brighten at holding a small wooden bird, I felt, if only for a second, that perhaps I was still giving something to this world.
Not joy for myself.
But joy for someone.
It wasn't much. It wasn't healing. But it kept me from disappearing entirely.
Still, they were empty years.
Years where my body went on moving but my soul remained locked in one night—the night she left.
Years where each gray dawn felt borrowed, not lived.
And yet, as I close my eyes now, reaching back across these blurred decades, I see that in emptiness, too, I still clung, however weakly, to traces of life.
And maybe that was enough.