The Loop

It’s clinical. It’s orderly. It has five neatly drawn stages: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and finally, the glowing shrine of Acceptance. They say it like it’s a checklist. Like grief is a ladder, and once you reach the top, you’re free.

But here’s the thing no one tells you—grief doesn’t follow GPS. It loops back. It spirals. It meanders like a drunk trying to find the door in the dark. It’s not five stages. It’s five rooms in a house you now live in, and some days, you wake up in the hallway, not knowing how you got there.

You don’t just go through grief. You orbit it.

There are days when denial feels like mercy. When your brain pretends they’re just on a trip, or at work, or sleeping in late. Your fingers still reach for their name in your phone. You make an extra cup of tea before remembering. You reread old messages just to pretend they’re writing back.

Then it crashes into a nothingness—the raw, feral kind that doesn’t make sense. You get mad at the universe for letting it happen, mad at strangers laughing in coffee shops because how dare joy still exist in a world that has collapsed for you.

Then comes bargaining. Not the old-school kind—this is modern desperation. You start offering pieces of yourself to the void. If. If I hadn’t. If I could. I’d give anything. As if grief is a god you can bribe.

And then, the heaviness. The stillness. The void that sits on your chest like a stone, pressing down your ribcage, making air feel expensive. You cancel plans. You let dishes rot in the sink. You answer while being at work because how do you explain that your soul feels like a collapsed lung?

Finally—sometimes—there’s acceptance. Not the glowing, peaceful closure from the movies. No, this acceptance is quieter. It’s waking up and realizing it’s been three days since you cried. And two days since you last spoke a word to another living being. It’s laughing at a memory and not feeling guilty afterward. But even this, even acceptance, isn’t permanent.

Because the cycle begins again.

That’s the thing. Grief isn’t linear. It’s recursive. A fractal of pain and memory and healing. You can be fine on a Monday and shattered on a Wednesday because someone wore their cologne or said a phrase they used to say. Grief tricks you into thinking it’s done—then reruns its greatest hits when you least expect it.

And that’s okay.

Because grief, as brutal as it is, is proof that you loved. That it mattered. Or matters.. It carves its initials into the architecture of your psyche, reshaping your empathy, your silence, your humor. You don’t “get over” loss. You metabolize it. You let it change you.

And slowly, you become someone else.

Not in a way that forgets. But in a way that carries.

You carry them in how you listen more closely to others now. You carry them in the way your voice softens when speaking of the past. You carry them in the art you make, in the pages you write, in the pauses between laughter.

So maybe there is no map. Maybe there’s just the journey—messy, looping, sacred.

It looks like insomnia. It looks like silence.

But it’s still survival.

Grief never leaves you. But it teaches you to live alongside it.