"Absence through grief is difficult. It's a silence that doesn't announce itself, it's just there, a silence that lingers in the space once filled with sound. You wake up expecting hoping to feel better. And as you're still waiting to feel better, the world continues. People carry on.

In the early days of losing my twin – there was a fog – a fog that added to the sharpness of my reality. What happens when one twin is gone, what remains? Half a conversation? A shadow of a presence, rather than a presence? There is no handbook for learning how to exist as one when you have always been two. And time does what it always does best – it moves on. It pulls you along when you're not ready. The world doesn't wait for those caught between holding on and letting go. So you etch forward, because you know standing still isn't an option.

At first grief is acknowledged. But soon, the pauses in conversation grow longer, the greetings more casual. Invitations that once arrived, become obligatory, then absent. You learn that grief is avoided. You walk into rooms and you feel the shift. There are days when the absence is almost bearable – when the silence is less sharp – when the world feels less foreign. And then there are days when the weight of it presses down, unsettling – reminders of what you've lost.

I navigate this strange reality where I recognise myself, but on the earth's plane, I am no longer physically a twin. I am slowly learning how to exist in this world – one that doesn't acknowledge me, or the bond I have lost. But still you carry on, what choice do you have? And somewhere you learn to exist in a world that no longer recognises you, or as part of a pair.

How do you navigate loss and grief? What have you found that works for you?