Ilya Repin’s

Repin Angel of Death Kills Firstborn of Egypt

 I used to believe love was the most overwhelming feeling. I thought love was the ultimate reality until I experienced guilt and grief simultaneously. I believed love was endless until I met grief face-to-face and realized it was eternal. 

Grief made me a time traveler. 

It dragged me back to moments I wanted to forget 

and froze me in memories I had no power to change. 

The thing about emotions is that they usually come in pairs. 

Disappointment arrives with anger. 

Sadness can walk hand in hand with nostalgia. Relief can be wrapped in exhaustion. 

Even the purest joy is shadowed by the awareness of its impermanence. 

Emotions are rarely simple. 

One opens the door, and another slips in quietly behind it. 

Nothing is ever felt in isolation. 

Grief didn’t just visit me—it built a home in me. 

It rearranged the furniture of my soul. 

Grief, I’ve come to learn, is not just an emotional response. 

It’s a confrontation with reality itself. 

It’s the collapse of the illusion that life moves in a straight line. 

When grief enters, time folds. 

The past is no longer behind you….it sits beside you. 

And in the house it built, grief moves some things: 

It took joy, which once sat like sunlight in the center of the room, and tucked it into a far corner. 

It dragged the couch of comfort out of reach. 

It replaced the mirror of identity with one that reflects only shame. 

It left drawers open—stuffed with memories—and no matter how many times you try to close them, they slide back open in the middle of the night. 

Guilt is the part of grief that thinks. 

Where grief feels, guilt questions. 

Grief is raw emotion—loss, pain, absence. 

But guilt steps in after the wave has hit and starts picking through the wreckage, asking why. 

Guilt is the analytical mind of grief. 

It doesn’t just mourn what was lost—it interrogates it. 

It demands a reason.  

Guilt isn’t content to sit quietly in sorrow. 

It rewinds. It replays. 

It constructs entire alternate realities where things turned out differently. 

It asks impossible questions: 

What if? 

Why didn’t I? 

Who was I then? 

It forces you into a kind of ethical archaeology, 

digging through moments, choices, silences—not to find peace, 

But to find meaning. 

I coined a word for it: Grilt, a blend of guilt and grief. 

By my definition, it’s the emotional state where mourning becomes entangled with self-blame. 

Grilt turns healing into a maze. 

It paints exit signs on walls that lead nowhere. 

When Solange said in Cranes in the Sky: 

“I tried to drink it away”—been there. 

“I tried to change it with my hair”—did that, and honestly, I’m shocked I’m not bald. 

“I tried to keep myself busy”—I tried that too. 

“I slept it away”—yep. 

“I sexed it away”—yup, yup, yup. 

Like Solange sang— 

None of it works. 

Something unique to my experience was this: 

Guilt had convinced me that carrying the weight of that sorrow was a form of love. 

Punishing myself proved that it mattered. 

I felt such intense guilt that I convinced myself 

If I let go of the guilt, I’d be letting go of what I had lost. 

But grief, in its own strange way, is honest. 

It demands presence. 

It says: “This happened.” 

There was a time I feared healing 

because healing felt like betrayal. 

If I smiled again, did that mean I forgot? 

But grief, when I really listened, wasn’t asking me to forget. 

It was asking me to remember differently. 

To carry, not collapse. 

To integrate, not erase. 

Guilt had me trapped in a courtroom in my mind, 

forever on trial, presenting evidence to a jury that never spoke. 

But healing began when I stopped arguing with the past. 

When I stopped rewriting every scene with better lines. 

When I said: 

Yes, it happened. 

Yes, I did my best with who I was then. 

And maybe that wasn’t perfect— 

But it was still love. 

Now, when I sit with my grief, 

I let it speak but I don’t let it speak over me. 

And when guilt knocks, 

I ask what it needs, not what it accuses. 

And maybe that’s the quiet miracle of it all. 

We move on, and we move forward 

carrying what once broke us 

as something sacred, not shameful. 

Not as weight, but as wisdom. 

Because some feelings don’t leave. 

They just become part of the architecture of who we are. 

And that, too, is a form of love. 

These feelings—grief and guilt they settle into the foundation. 

They shape how we see, how we hold, how we stay soft in a world that asks us to harden. 

They remind us where we’ve been and what we’ve learned. 

They teach us the depth of our capacity to feel. 

To care. 

To remember. 

We are not meant to move on. 

We are meant to move with. 

So I walk forward carrying it all 

not as a burden, 

But as a map. 

Because I am an archive of everything I couldn’t fix.