Page 68 of Holding Onto You


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The silence wraps around my words, holding them.

I close my eyes.

Let myself feel everything.

The grief.

The love.

The impossible truth that he’s not coming back.

But also… the strength. The quiet kind. The kind that lives in the space between breaking and rebuilding.

“I’m not scared anymore,” I breathe. “Not of this. Not of remembering you.”

“I think you’d be okay with Logan and I being together,” I add softly, thinking of Logan’s sleeping form, of his unwavering patience, of the way his presence fills the empty parts of me without trying to fix them. “Actually... I think you’d give him Hell just for fun.”

My lips curve. A real smile. “You also know I would kick your ass if you went too far.” It feels strange. Smiling. I falter for asecond, but only a second, because this smile doesn’t feel like a betrayal.

My Grief hasn’t disappeared. My love is still here. but instead of sitting heavy with nowhere to go, now I know where it belongs. It reaches out, toward him—towards all of them—like a quiet offering.

Today I walk with it. Not away from it.

Sometimes the bravest thing we can do is open a door we’ve kept closed—especially when what’s behind it is everything we’ve lost.

I reach for the hoodie on the chair and hold it to my chest, breathing him in.

I turn to leave—

But something holds me still.

A pull. Soft. Invisible. Anchoring me to this space.

My gaze drops to the bedside drawer.

His drawer.

I stare at it, the air thick with the weight of memory. My fingers hover above the metal handle, shaking slightly. Then, with a breath I didn’t know I was holding, I open it.

It’s chaos inside—just like him. Guitar picks scattered between old receipts, a crumpled photo strip from a booth at the fair—us as kids, pulling faces, laughing like life would never touch us.

But behind it all—neat, tucked away, waiting—

A stack of black notebooks.

The sight knocks the air from my lungs.

I reach for them slowly, like I’m touching something private, something he didn’t want the world to see.

The first one opens to lyrics—page after page of them.

His handwriting is messy, alive, etched with energy. Some words are scratched out, others circled, arrows drawn to rearranged verses. It’s him. His rhythm. His voice.

But the third one is different.

There’s no song title. No chords. Just a quiet date at the top.

I pause.