Soap Box Corner

I hope this reaches someone who needs it. A friend of mine recently went through a loss, and I want to share a journal entry from my own experiences, hoping it might offer some comfort. You are not alone, many feel your pain, we all are human.

There he was. Still. Unmoving. As though the world had paused around him. A father. A husband. A friend. A brother. A son. To me, my Dad.

Time did something strange in that moment. It didn’t stop, exactly, but it lost all its meaning. Seconds dragged like hours, and yet entire minutes vanished without a trace. I stood there, staring, and in the span of a breath, years of memories flickered through my mind: birthday mornings, silent car rides, arguments that seemed endless, and quiet gestures that meant more than words ever could.

We never saw eye to eye. We often argued, misunderstood each other, and lived in opposite corners of thought. But none of that mattered now, not here, not in this moment suspended between what was and what will never be again.

I couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak. And I definitely couldn’t cry. Not yet. My body refused to react, as if grieving required a kind of permission from time itself. I felt trapped, frozen at the edge of something I couldn’t define. The moment seemed both infinite and unbearably brief. Like standing in the eye of a storm where time folds in on itself, one part of me rooted in the now, and another suddenly reliving everything that ever was between us.

His passing didn’t feel like something that just happened. It felt like a rupture in the timeline of my life. A fracture. A glitch. As if time itself had hiccupped and left me standing in a moment that stretches endlessly forward and backward, looping over itself in silence.

This wasn’t just the end of a life. It was the end of an era, a period I didn’t know had a boundary until now. And with him gone, everything before this moment feels like it belongs to another lifetime, while everything after feels unreal, premature.

And yet, in the span of a heartbeat, the world will go on. People will walk, talk, laugh, live, unaware that somewhere, for someone, time has collapsed. That a clock has stopped ticking, not in the world, but inside a heart.

I know the grief will come later, in its own cruel rhythm. But for now, I’m stuck here, between seconds, between breaths, between the man he was and the silence he left behind.