The White Wolf

Grief didn’t arrive like a gentle visitor. It came snarling, feral, all teeth and smoke, ripping up the garden I thought was mine. One year it was drought cracking my tongue. The next it was a brushfire that lit up at dusk and didn’t stop until it had blackened the hills. There was no manual for it. Only instinct.

When friends drifted away, it felt like wolves peeling off from the pack at dusk. The silence left behind wasn’t quiet. It was the echo of howls in a hollow throat. I’d stand on a ridge watching their shadows slide into trees, my own breath turning into steam as if my body couldn’t decide whether it wanted to warm itself or disappear.

The rest of the losses were the bones of my past. Not bodies, but skins I shed, landscapes I abandoned when they became poison. I left a house that was burning from the inside out; not because I wanted to be heroic but because staying would have swallowed me whole. That escape felt like jumping a fence with my fur singed, smoke still in my lungs, knowing some would blame me for the blaze while others would never understand the singe marks on my hands.

Grief taught me that mourning isn’t always about funerals. Sometimes it’s about burying versions of yourself you had to kill to survive. Sometimes it’s about sitting in the ashes of what you walked away from and admitting that even necessary endings bleed.

My rituals were not neat. I lit candles like sparklers in a cave, one by one, letting them spit and crackle. I whispered names I’d given to myself, to past seasons, to silent things, like a fox whispering to the burrows it used to sleep in. I dug small holes in blackened earth and pressed seeds into them without any guarantee of rain. Some seasons nothing grew. Some seasons, stubborn green pushed up anyway, sharp and tender all at once.

If you think grief belongs only to those who watch graves close, you’ve never felt what it is to bury an entire wilderness of memory. You’ve never dug your own claws into the dirt to make room for a new den because the old one flooded. You’ve never mourned a name you had to spit out of your mouth just to breathe again.

I still prowl those burned fields. I still feel the way the wind shifts when memory claws at my door. I walk barefoot on new growth, careful not to crush the shoots that insist on rising. I don’t pretend there aren’t stones. I stack them into cairns so I don’t trip on them next time I circle back.

This is my treaty with grief: it will always remind me of what I’ve walked through. I will always remind it that I’m still moving.