Growing up, my favorite thing in the entire world was going to my grandpa's farm and watching him work. It wasn't anything extraordinary to anyone else. There were no tourist attractions, no fancy equipment, no picturesque barns like the ones that show up in movies. It was just an old farm in the middle of nowhere—dry earth, rows of crops that sometimes lived and sometimes didn't, a few cattle that wandered with more stubbornness than sense, and a collection of tools that were older than me and somehow still hanging together. But it was home in a way nothing else ever was.
When I was small, I didn't understand the work involved. I didn't understand the weight on my grandparents' shoulders or the tension in their voices when they talked about money. I only saw the little things—the way my grandpa's hands moved when he fixed a fence, the way my grandma hummed when she cooked, the smell of the soil after it rained, the way the wind shifted right before a storm. Everything felt simple then. Everything felt calm and beautiful.
Whenever life outside the farm became loud or chaotic, that place silenced the noise. My grandpa didn't talk much, but I liked that. He didn't need to. I could sit on the edge of the field for an hour watching him work, and in that time I felt more understood than I ever did around people who used too many words. He would glance up occasionally, give me a nod, maybe a half-smile, and then keep going. That was enough for me. Silence was a language on its own.
But time, as I learned, doesn't ask permission before it changes things. It doesn't care what you love, or what you want to hold onto. It keeps moving forward, dragging everything with it whether you're ready or not. And eventually, it dragged my childhood away too.
I was fifteen when my grandpa died. The memory is something I wish I could forget, but it's carved into me, hard and sharp. One moment he was standing, moving like he always did—slow but steady—leaning into his work even when his back ached and his knees didn't want to cooperate. The next moment he wasn't. There was no warning. No long illness. No last conversation. One second he was alive, and the next he wasn't. A heart attack, that's what the doctors said. Quick, sudden, final.
I remember the exact sound my grandmother made when she got the call. It wasn't a scream and it wasn't a cry. It was something in between—something hollow, like the air being punched out of her soul. They had been married for more than forty years. Longer than I'd been alive. They did everything together. Ate together. Worked together. Slept beside each other every night. Losing him wasn't losing a person to her—she lost the other half of her existence.
I tried to be strong for her, even though I didn't know what that meant. I tried to help around the farm, even though I didn't know enough to make a real difference. But grief isn't something you can fix with effort. And some wounds aren't meant to heal.
She lasted only a few months. I watched the life drain from her slowly, day by day. Not dramatically—there were no hospital scenes, no sudden collapse. She simply faded. She stopped eating well, stopped sleeping well, stopped caring whether the sun rose or set. I saw her body weaken. I saw her spirit crumble. She had always been small, but in those months she became fragile in a way that scared me. It was like the world no longer had enough in it to keep her anchored.
By the end of that year, she was gone too.
I remember standing in their empty house after the funeral. The silence was suffocating. Everything looked the same but felt wrong, like the walls knew something was missing. The smell of their home—old wood, dust, and the faint scent of whatever my grandmother used to wash clothes with—hit me so hard I couldn't breathe. I sat in their living room and cried until I couldn't anymore.
People talk about moving on like it's a switch you flip. They say it's something you eventually learn to do. Maybe that's true for some people. But when you lose the people who shaped you, taught you, loved you without conditions, moving on feels like betrayal. It feels like erasing them. For a long time, I didn't want to. I didn't know how to be someone without them.
But time kept going. It didn't slow down for me any more than it had for them. Months passed. Then more months. I went back to school. Went through the motions of living. I pretended I was fine when people asked. I pretended I could handle it. And slowly, piece by piece, I learned how to exist again. I wouldn't say I healed, because "healed" implies something is fixed. It wasn't. It still isn't. But I learned how to carry it.
Just when I thought the worst had passed, the world found a new way to hit me. My grandparents had never been wealthy. They had owned the land for decades, but land doesn't mean much when the bills are bigger than the harvests. They'd been struggling for years, taking out small loans, then bigger loans, trying to stay afloat. After they were gone, everything fell into the hands of the estate.
And the government did what it does best—it took.
They quoted an insanely low price for the land, saying they were "settling outstanding debts." They didn't care about the memories tied to that soil. They didn't care that my grandparents spent their lives keeping that farm alive. They didn't care that it was our home, our history. They only cared about numbers on paper. With a few signatures and a process no one bothered to explain to me, the land was gone. Sold off. Erased.
I remember standing at the edge of the field the last day I ever saw it. The crops were gone. The house sat empty, windows reflecting nothing but the sky. The barn door was half open, swaying in the wind. Everything looked abandoned, as if the moment my grandparents died, the land had died with them. I picked up a handful of dirt, held it for a long time, and then let it fall through my fingers. It was the last thing I took from that place.
Broken and tired and feeling older than fifteen should ever feel, I tried to find something resembling normal life again. But grief layers itself. It doesn't go away; it just stacks. Losing my grandparents was the first layer. Losing their land was the second. The world had hit me hard, and it wasn't done yet.
I lived in California then. Even though the sun shined most days, even though the sky looked clear and the ocean felt close, none of it made a difference. I carried this heaviness everywhere. I couldn't escape it. And one evening, after another long day of trying to pretend everything was fine, I found myself walking without thinking. My feet carried me to a ledge overlooking the city.
The air was cool, almost cold. I remember leaning over the edge, staring at the lights below. Cars moved like tiny flickers, people living their lives without any idea that the world could break someone so easily. I wasn't planning to jump. I wasn't trying to do anything dramatic. I was just tired—tired in a way that didn't feel like it belonged to someone my age.
I stood there for a while, breathing slowly, thinking about my grandparents, their farm, the silence of the fields at night. I wondered if I'd ever feel that kind of peace again. I wondered if grief would always feel like a weight pressing down on my chest. I wondered if the world would ever stop taking from me.
Eventually, I told myself I should go home. I stepped back, turned around, and started walking. That's when my foot slipped. It wasn't dramatic. It wasn't cinematic. It was just a simple misstep—the kind anyone could make. My heel slid on the loose gravel. My balance disappeared before I could correct it. And the next thing I knew, I was falling.
There was a crash, a burst of pain that hit so suddenly I couldn't even scream, and then everything went black.
Not peaceful. Not gentle. Just black.
And that was the end of everything I knew.