Until that day, I had always been grateful to God and to life.

But that day changed everything.

Life struck at my core strength and succeeded in breaking me into pieces. It was the worst day of my life, the day my perfect world turned imperfect forever. I wish I could truly erase that date from the calendar. It was the day I confronted the weakest version of myself. The day my faith in God was shaken to its core. The day I asked God, for the first time in my life, “Why us?” The day I dared to say that God had been unfair.

That was the day I lost my younger brother.

There was almost a decade between us, and I had taken care of him since he was a child. That day, my world didn’t just turn imperfect, it shattered like a palace of glass, in minutes, in seconds. And it didn’t fall apart in a way that ever allowed me to forget it.

It took almost five years to rebuild my world, piece by piece, using the fragile glue of time, faith, hope, and strength. Even now, the marks of that glue are visible. They appear whenever life tests me again.

When it first collapsed, I felt as though I was standing in fragments of glass that pierced my body from every side. And those sharper fragments were nothing but fragments of my broken heart, shattered faith, crumbling beliefs, and pieces of myself that were slipping away. Standing in that wreckage, I faced a mountain of grief that I had to somehow cross.

I never knew how I was going to do it.

The hardest task was climbing that mountain while holding all those broken pieces of my crumbled world in hand. It is easier to walk when your heart is whole, when your faith and beliefs are intact. But the weight of those fragments felt heavier than anything I had ever carried.

For months, I walked through darkness with bleeding heart and mind that was barely functioning. I moved along the path of depression, where grief surrounded me from every direction.

Slowly, very slowly, I began to see light.That journey was possible only because I had people around me, people who truly cared and books that became my guiding light in the tunnel of darkness. They supported me, stood by me, and tried to lift me up. But in the beginning, the words made no sense to me at all.

Yes,that is the truth: there are moments when words have not yet been invented to make you feel lighter. And then there are moments when words lose all their power altogether, it doesn’t matter who stands in front of you, offering consolation. But the real truth is that no one in the world can ever fully understand your pain at that time. I was foolish enough to think that I understood and felt others pain during their difficult times. Because, you simply cannot understand the intensity.

The phrase I heard most often “You are strong”, it just kept bothering me. Because deep down, I knew I wasn’t. If I had been strong, why did the pain hurt so deeply? Why did it reach a point where sometimes dying felt easier than living?

It’s not that I had never witnessed death before. I had seen it within my own family. But this was different. This was the first time I lost someone I loved, lost a piece of my heart permanently.

To the outside world, I may have looked the same for past five years. But inside, something fundamental had changed. My soul light was dimmed. My faith in god was cracked. The strength I once took pride in trembled under the weight of grief.

I used to say, “Time heals everything.”

But I have lived through more than a thousand days since then, and I can say this without hesitation:

Time doesn’t heal everything.

Some wounds simply learn to live quietly within you.The emotional vacuum left behind on that day is not something you move on from ever. You simply learn to carry it , with a permanent scar in your heart.

I don’t share this for sympathy. I share this because maybe someone else out there is carrying a similar weight. Maybe your perfect world shattered too. And maybe, just maybe, reading this will make you feel a little less alone in your silence.

This post isn’t about healing.It’s about acknowledging that some days rewrite who we are.

January 22, 2021 is one such date for me.

This is not a story of recovery.

It is a story of survival.

And sometimes, that is more than enough.

If you are reading this while carrying a loss of your own, know this:

You are not weak for still feeling the pain. You are human for carrying love that had nowhere else to go.

And if all you are doing today is surviving, that itself is an act of courage.

In the end, you are a human being with a whole lot of emotions and you have every right to take as much time as you need to grieve and mourn. Let the world think and judge as it wants..

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So this is to the broken soul , that carried me through the storm.

Today, I thank her and officially announce my first milestone towards recovery.