Losing your parents in your twenties feels like being trapped in someone else’s story. You didn’t ask for this plotline, and yet, here you are. The world keeps moving—people keep living their lives—but something is missing. Something fundamental is absent, and it’s a gap you can never fill.
The loss doesn’t strike you once, like a lightning bolt. No, it’s subtle. It lingers in the corners of your mind, in the shadows where you used to think you knew what was real. It comes when you wake up in the morning, ready for the world, only to be slapped with the knowledge that you don’t have the luxury of calling them anymore. The phone feels too heavy in your hand. You don’t realize it until you reach for it, fingers already dialing, that you’ll never hear their voices again.
But it’s the empty spaces that get you. The silence where their laughter used to be. The absence that lingers like a pressure in your chest. It’s the little things, the minutiae of life, that come crashing down in those quiet moments. You realize you don’t remember the last conversation you had with them. You don’t know exactly when you said goodbye—when that last word fell between you, unspoken, unnoticed. It’s gone, slipping from your memory as if it was never there at all. And the world tilts.
Nothing feels right. You reach for the routine, try to hold onto the habits, but even those are becoming unfamiliar, like clothing that’s too tight or shoes that pinch your feet. You can hear their voices in the back of your mind, but they’re muffled now, distant echoes that seem to disappear before you can catch them. Their faces start to blur, their gestures fading. The things they used to do, the way they moved—those things are slipping away, vanishing as the days go on.
Sometimes, it feels like you’re drowning in that absence. The grief is not loud, not a sudden storm, but a steady, suffocating pressure that doesn’t let up. It’s not sadness—it’s emptiness. A vacuum where they used to be. It’s the silence after you forget to call them, the days you forget their favorite songs. It’s the way everything in your world starts to feel hollow, like the shell of a house after it’s burned down, the framework remaining but no heart, no life.
Your friends try to console you. They say the things that people say in these moments: “It’s what they would’ve wanted. They wouldn’t want you to be sad.” But the words never make it past your skin. They feel like something they’ve memorized, like lines in a play they’ve only ever heard about, never truly lived. How do you move on when the world doesn’t feel like it used to? How do you get out of bed when everything feels wrong, like stepping into a world where the rules have changed without you? How do you keep walking when the ground beneath you feels too soft, as if it might give way at any moment?
But you do it. You get up. You keep moving forward because there’s nothing else to do. You put one foot in front of the other and walk through a world that’s familiar but isn’t. Everything around you seems the same, and yet… it’s not. There’s a sense that something has been rearranged. You don’t notice it at first, but it’s like the air tastes different now. And you can’t shake the feeling that something isn’t right.
It’s on a night like any other that things start to shift. At first, it’s almost imperceptible. A flicker at the edge of your vision, a brief shadow that’s not quite where it should be. A noise—a whisper—carried on the wind, but when you turn around, there’s nothing there. You laugh at yourself. It’s nothing, of course. Just the remnants of your grief, the fog in your head, the things that linger when you’re not paying attention. But then… there’s a pressure. A pull. You can feel it at the back of your mind. You can’t explain it, but it’s there—an old, familiar tug. You start to follow it, even though you don’t want to. It’s a memory, but not one you remember living. You know it, though. You can feel it in your bones.
And then, it hits you.
They’re here.
Not in the way you thought, not in the way you had hoped. They’re not ghosts, not shadows that haunt the corner of your eye. No, they are here in a way you didn’t expect. You hear their voices—not in the past, but right now. As if they’ve never really left. You can feel their presence, like a pull in your chest, like something unspoken calling you forward.
You don’t understand it at first. How could you? But the moment the realization hits you, you start to walk—no, you start to follow.
Without thinking, without understanding, you let yourself go. The streets outside your door feel familiar but wrong, as if they’ve been twisted just slightly, just enough to disorient you.
When you reach your old house, it looms before you, but it’s not like it was. The windows are too dark, the door creaking open on its own, and as you step inside, everything seems just a little too still. The walls press in on you, the air too thick, the house too heavy, like it’s holding its breath, waiting for something. But it’s not until you turn the corner and find the door—small, almost childlike, slightly ajar—that you know something is very wrong.
You approach, heart pounding, every instinct telling you to turn back. The light spilling from the crack of the door is soft, warm, but you can feel something else in it, something deeper, something that tugs at your insides and makes your skin crawl. The moment you open the door, you step into an endless hallway. It stretches, twisting, and you feel the walls move in on you, too close, too tight.
There’s no escape.
You don’t turn back, though. You’ve come this far, and whatever is waiting ahead, it’s something you have to see. But the hallway is shifting now, and the air is colder than it should be. The voices of your parents are louder now, stronger, but you can’t place where they are. They’re all around you. There’s no escape. It isn’t a door—it’s a trap.
And then you understand.
The absence, the weight of their loss, it’s not something you can fix. It’s not something you can fill. The truth is worse. The emptiness, the void where they used to be—it’s inside you.
You never left.
And so, you stand there, trapped between who you were and who you’re supposed to be, between the love you lost and the life you’re trying to build.
The house isn’t a memory. It isn’t a place. It’s a reflection of your grief. A labyrinth of what you’ve buried. You’ve been walking it your whole life, each step a mark of the things you thought you could outrun.
But in that moment, you understand. You can’t escape it. You can’t forget them. Not really.
And the thing is, you don’t need to.
Because the real door is inside you. The way forward isn’t through the hallway, through the memories, but through accepting the weight. You reach for it, grasp it, and step into the darkness, knowing that the grief you’ve been carrying wasn’t an end. It was the beginning of something else.
You take a breath.
And you keep walking – through the door.