Still Driving

There’s something deeply disorienting about holding the wheel with steady hands while your inner world feels anything but steady. You’re here—watching the road, obeying the rules—while something enormous and unresolved lives just behind your eyes.

For a long time, I kept glancing backward. Not literally, but emotionally. Replaying moments. Conversations. Decisions. The endless loop of could have, should have, if only. Grief is relentless that way—it invites you to believe that the past is negotiable if you just examine it long enough.  But it isn’t.

At some point, I realized that constantly looking back was pulling me out of the present moment—the only place I was actually still living. The rear view was full enough. I didn’t need to live there too.  Not looking back doesn’t mean forgetting.  It doesn’t mean erasing love or memory.  It means refusing to punish myself with an impossible rewrite.

Grief didn’t sit politely in the passenger seat. It followed me. It appeared suddenly, without asking. But I learned that I didn’t have to stop the car every time it showed up. 

I have learned that grief makes the past feel negotiable and it is not.