They say the body weeps in salt
when the soul cannot speak.
And so it was
tears fell,
not just from eyes
but from every seam
that once held me together.

She had been the thread.
Forty years of quiet stitching,
laughter tucked into hems,
arguments patched with time,
a life quilted in shared breath.
Then came the rip.
Not sudden,
but final.
Joy, her name,
and the irony of it
cut deeper than the silence she left behind.

I did not cry at first. I tore.
The world split,
in calendars, in cupboards,
in the way the bed
no longer made sense.
Grief was not a visitor.
It was a blade.
And I, a fabric unravelling.

Tears came later.
Not as weakness,
but as water finding its way
through the fault lines.
They were not just drops.
They were declarations:

“I am broken.”

“I am still here.”

“I remember.”

Each tear a stitch,
not to mend the rip,
but to honour it.
To trace its edges
with trembling fingers
and say –
this is where love lived.
This is where it tore me open.
This is where healing begins.