& life goes on.

"life goes on" is not an ending; it's the beginning of everything you haven't lived yet.

The first and hardest truth we have to accept is this: life doesn’t stop for anyone. Not for heartbreak, not for grief, not even for the moments that feel so massive, so excruciating, that surely the sky itself should split open to bear witness.

You can lose everything you thought you couldn’t live without—a person, a dream, a version of yourself that once felt eternal—and somewhere, not far from where you are breaking, a stranger will be falling in love for the very first time, a child will be laughing so hard they can barely breathe, a grocery store will be restocking its shelves with quiet, ordinary insistence, as if the world hasn’t shifted at all.

It feels cruel sometimes, the way life keeps moving forward, indifferent to whether or not you are able to move with it, the way hours and days and years continue to spill out across the floor of your life even when you have nothing left inside you to meet them.

Maybe part of you expects, deep down, that the world should at least slow down out of respect for your loss, that time should pause, that the noise and the brightness and the absurd rhythm of daily life should hush itself long enough for you to catch your breath.
But it doesn’t, and it won’t, and it never has.

The sun still rises on mornings that feel uninhabitable.
The bills still come due.
The people you pass in the street still have their birthdays, their bad days, their first kisses, their last goodbyes, utterly unaware that everything inside you has rearranged itself into something sharp and unrecognizable.

There is no great cosmic stillness reserved for your private sorrows.
There is only this: life, humming and pulsing and surging forward, as thoughtlessly as blood through a body that does not know how to stop beating.

And you, battered and broken and bewildered, are somehow expected to keep moving too.

You can try to hold still, to dig your heels into the soft earth of memory and refuse to be dragged forward, to replay the past over and over until the pain starts to feel almost holy in its familiarity.
You can try to live there, inside what was lost, convincing yourself that if you just stay long enough, life will notice your loyalty and circle back for you.

But it won’t.

It will keep slipping past you, faster and faster, like water you cannot dam with your bare hands, like a river that was never yours to command in the first place.

And the longer you stay frozen, the harder it becomes to remember how to step back into the current without drowning.

That is a brutal thing to realize.
It is also, somehow, a doorway.

Because as much as it hurts to know that life does not stop for our sorrow, it is also the only reason any of us survive it.
If time truly paused for every heartbreak, if the world truly honored every loss by falling silent and still, we would never get unstuck; we would never be able to leave the broken places behind us; we would never arrive at the mornings when the weight is lighter, the laughter comes easier, the hope begins to stir again in our chests.

Life’s refusal to stop for our pain is not a punishment.
It is the mechanism of our healing.

It doesn’t ask you to be ready.
It doesn’t demand you be okay.
It simply carries you forward, inch by stubborn inch, until one day you wake up and realize you are not quite the same person who broke apart all those lifetimes ago.

You are something new, something softer perhaps, but also stronger, wiser, shaped by your losses but not defined by them.

So yes, grieve.
Fall apart.
Feel everything, every jagged, searing, impossible thing, because it matters and it deserves to be honored.

Mourn the version of your life that didn’t survive.
Mourn the dreams you had to bury.
Mourn the people who are not coming back.

But do not, please do not, confuse mourning with living.
Do not build a permanent home inside your grief.

Because the truth is, the living is still happening—quietly, stubbornly, relentlessly—all around you, even when you cannot yet feel it stirring under your skin.

The living is waiting for you.
Not demanding, not rushing, not judging; just waiting, patiently, like a tide that knows it will eventually pull you back into its rhythm.

"Life goes on" is not a dismissal of your pain.
It is not a callous shrug at the things you have lost.
It is not an order to hurry up and heal faster.

It is a promise: that this, too, is not the end of you.
That beyond this ache, beyond this loneliness, beyond this impossible chapter, there is still more life waiting to meet you.
That you are being carried toward it even when you do not believe you can take another step on your own.

It is a promise that the story is not over.

It is a promise that you are not over.

You are being carried forward by something older and wilder than sorrow.
You are being stitched back together by hands you cannot see.
You are becoming someone you have not yet met.

And someday—not today, but someday—
you will realize that you survived what you thought would break you.

Not perfectly.
Not painlessly.
But completely.

And that will be enough.

Life goes on.
And somehow, so do we.