GRIEF Poem: SILVER DOG, by Nayara Guercio

The house stood still.
Light spilled
across the floor, soft as milk,
catching dust that drifted slow and lazy,
as if even time didn’t want to move.

Boxes yawned wide.
old spectacles too scratched to see through,
watches frozen mid-tick,
a silver dog souvenir,
proud and slightly ridiculous,
sitting there like it had always belonged.
And her address book, stained and stubborn,
clinging to names no one had dialled in years.

I knelt in the middle of it all,
surrounded by the beautiful mess
of a life carefully gathered,
then carelessly left behind.

There it was
her record sleeve,
corners curled, colours faded,
Dircinha Batista smiling up at me
from decades ago.

I lowered the needle.
Static grumbled first like the music itself
hadn’t quite had its coffee yet
then the song bloomed:
soft, cracked, familiar.

“Lá vai o meu trolinho”
I whispered, laughing a little at myself
when my throat caught anyway.

And just like that,
the room filled with her again:
rosewater and burnt coffee,
the slap of slippers down the fourth floor corridor,
her off-key humming,
her stirring soups she’d forget five minutes later.

Grief, it turns out,
is not one dramatic storm,
but bad weather with no forecast.
Some days it drizzles,
other days it pours.
And sometimes,
it makes you smile
at a silly silver dog souvenir
you never really liked.

I caught the glint of her golden bracelet on my wrist.
Thin, delicate.
Like her wrists had become,
birdlike and hollow,
yet even then,
her hands still curled around it in sleep…
as if love was muscle memory,
as if her body knew
what her mind forgot.

I closed the box slowly,
placing the record on top,
tucking the address book beside it,
next to that daft little funny dog
and the oil-stained recipe
she never finished writing.

These odd, ordinary things
the shape of her life,
packed in cardboard,
still warm from the sun.

The song played on,
trailing behind me
like a ribbon in the wind
cracked, stubborn,
refusing to stop.

I stood in the doorway,
the box pressed close against my chest,
and I knew she wasn’t there
not really,
not in the room,
not in the air.
But she was here,
in me,
stitched into the soft parts,
woven into the places
where love lives long after memory fades.

And even though this grief would stay…
This forever-grief…
its quiet, loyal kind of forever
so would the gratitude.
For every soup forgotten,
For every song remembered
for every tune sung off-key,
for every day
that I was loved.

So I smiled,
whispered goodbye,
and carried her forward.

Forever.