I’m left in the wake of the ship going down. I’m left in the dust of the collapse. My ears are ringing from the explosion. I’m stunned. It’s quiet now and the quiet leaves only the sounds of nature. Only the birds and water and breeze.

And they remind me that they are still there.

They survived and seem to always perpetuate the endless cycle of peace that exists behind and underneath and sideways of the chaos and frenzy that is life.

How are they still here?

How does life continue to produce such simple beauty in the face of such bare and raging darkness?

How resilient it must be.

The universe must know how to keep the balance.How to convey that darkness does not prevail.

It may want to. It may want to swallow whole in utter despair the beautiful and hopeful things of existence.

But it can’t.

Why?

When the dark pushes, the light pushes back. Maybe if the darkness didn’t push, the light wouldn’t be as strong, resilient. Maybe it wouldn’t exist.

It’s so gentle, but strong. Delicate and beautiful but a force of power. Like a spider’s web.

I’m left in the wake and as the waves wash over me, I’m quiet. I’m empty.

The joy has been ripped from my chest and I float in the water and let the gentle resilience of nature carry me. For I cannot carry myself.

That’s what I’ve held onto this past year—the quiet resilience of the wild. The way life keeps showing up even after devastation. The way trees split open and still stretch toward the sky. The way water carves stone not by force, but by persistence. The way weeds grow through pavement like they don’t know they’re not supposed to.

I didn’t know how to keep going, but somehow, I did. Not because I figured it out. Not because I “moved on.” But because I let myself be carried. I let the natural world be a kind of cradle when I had no strength of my own.

The wild has held me when nothing else could. In the quiet of the woods, in the flash of a hawk overhead, in the way wildflowers keep blooming in impossible places—I’ve remembered that I’m not the only one who’s been through a storm.

There is something about grief that strips away everything that isn’t real. And what remains—what’s left standing after the winds pass through—is the most essential thing. The most honest. The most alive.

I still cry. I still ache. I still look for Ian in the curve of a mountain, in the stillness of water, in the shadows of trees.

But I’m held. I’m still here. I’m slowly growing.