What happens when healing feels like dying? It doesn’t feel like sadness. It doesn’t feel like a broken heart. It feels like a death. It feels like you are being systematically erased from existence. There is a hollowed-out crater in your chest where a life used to be, a phantom limb where a person used to stand, and the constant taste of ash in your mouth. This is not poetry. This is the raw, unvarnished, physiological truth of what it feels like when a universe that was built for two suddenly implodes. It’s the nervous system screaming in protest, a cellular alarm ringing in every corner of your being, telling you that a vital part of your world has been amputated. You find yourself compulsively checking your phone, a modern form of prayer to a god that has already forsaken you. You rehearse old conversations, picking at the scabs of memory until they bleed. You cannot eat, or you cannot stop eating. You cannot sleep, or you sleep for twelve hours and wake up more exhausted than before. There is a primal scream lodged in your throat, a howl of pure, animal grief that you choke back down with every