For a while after a loss, you don't so much live as get through. You do the dishes. You answer the texts. You make the face people need to see. And underneath, you've gone somewhere far and grey, curled around the place where it used to be.

Grief closes you — it folds the chest down over the heart to guard it. That isn't weakness; it's the body doing the only thing it knows to keep you safe.

But the yogis named the center at the heart the unstruck place — the part that, however much it breaks, was never actually wounded. And one ordinary morning, without deciding to, you catch yourself lifting your face to the light. A song gets through. You laugh before you remember not to.

Let it be slow today. Let it be partial. Let it count anyway.

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