The Anatomy of Goodbye

A guide to surviving their absence

• Start with your hands. Let them memorise the absence of their hands in yours. Trace the shape of a name into your palm until the skin forgets who it belongs to. Practice reaching for a body no longer there. Wave, eventually. Do not expect a wave back.

• Remove your tongue. Lay it carefully beside all the things you never said. Bite down on stay. Swallow, I forgive you. Taste the metallic edge of regret. Learn that grief often arrives dressed as silence.

• Examine the ribs. There, beneath the sternum, you will find a small animal clawing at the locked door of a warm memory. Feel it stir whenever their name is spoken aloud. Do not release it. Some creatures mistake cages for homes.

• Briefly wash your eyes with salt, or else the catalogue of every departure will be hazy. Study the shape they leave behind in doorways, in bedsheets, in photographs you can no longer bear to look at. Blink. Repeat.

• Invite your lungs to participate. Fill them with the dust of old conversations. Exhale entire lifetimes. Watch them vanish into the air as though they were never yours to begin with.

• Offer your heart to the ritual. Slice it open like a pomegranate. Count the jewelled seeds of every person who left. Eat them. Become the orchard of your own undoing.

• Finally, face your skeleton as you stand alone in front of the mirror. Count the fractures that healed crooked and the ones that never healed at all. Notice how every person who left has carved their initials somewhere into the bone. Straighten your shoulders. Walk into tomorrow.