The leaves of grief

I reached for the curtain. Sunlight flared, white and sudden, flooding the room. I blinked.Then I froze.She stood where she always did. Red coat. Green dungarees. Blonde hair loose, ungoverned, as if the world had never taught it to behave. Leaves lifted and spun around her, reckless and bright against the sky.My sister.I did not move. I had learned not to. These moments were brief, and I had learned that wanting made them shorter.She came more often as the year thinned toward winter. As Christmas approached. As if the calendar itself remembered her. As if absence kept appointments.My mother said she felt her then. Said December softened the edges between things. Said grief had seasons, and this was hers. I watched my mother learn how to live with a child-shaped silence, watched her rearrange herself around it. Some parts of her never came back. Others grew louder, sharper, as if grief needed space and took it where it could.When my sister died, I lost more than her. I lost the version of my mother who laughed without warning. The one who didn’t scan rooms for echoes. The one who didn’t look at light and call it cruel.The day my sister passed was bright like this. Too bright. The kind of morning that feels incorrect in retrospect, as if the world had made a mistake and refused to apologise. My mother never trusted sunlight again. I think that was the day I learned how grief can rewrite even the weather.Afterwards, the sightings began. Reflections. Movement where there should have been none. Leaves lifting without reason. My mother said it meant love had nowhere else to go. That it overflowed. I did not argue. I did not agree. I learned that belief was sometimes a form of mercy, and that my role was not to interrupt it.But being the one who lived came with its own accounting.I learned how to carry quiet. How to become reliable. How not to ask for too much, because there was already too much in the room. I learned that surviving does not make you lucky. It makes you careful.The light shifted. The leaves fell.She was gone.I stood there longer than necessary, listening to the house settle back into itself. Somewhere downstairs, my mother moved. Breathing resumed its ordinary rights. And I remained, holding the cost of loving someone who would never grow older than my memory of her.