Goodbye by Ciara Sadie Chetty

Goodbye

Grief is a language I never wanted to learn,

yet here I am, speaking it in every breath.

It hides in the quiet corners of my day,

slipping into the spaces where your presence used to stay.

I keep replaying the way things were,

as if memory could stitch the torn edges back together.

But no matter how many times I press rewind,

the ending is the same—

you’re gone, and I’m left holding silence like a fragile glass.

Goodbye is such a small word

for something that feels endless.

It rolls off the tongue too easily,

but it carves into the heart like stone.

It doesn’t just end a chapter—

it steals the book, the pen,

the very ink I thought I’d keep writing with.

I walk through my days carrying you in fragments,

a scent in the air, a song on the radio,

a sudden ache when the world forgets

that I’m still mourning.

People tell me time will heal,

but time only teaches me how to hide the limp,

how to smile without showing the scar.

Goodbye isn’t just a word I said once—

it’s the echo that follows me,

the shadow that sits at the end of every prayer.

And yet, buried in the heaviness,

there’s a strange kind of love that never dies.

A love that grief cannot erase,

a love that lingers in the cracks,

a love that whispers, *you mattered,