ILUKA CHAYAN

The Man Who Learned My Grief Schedule

I didn’t notice it the first time because it felt like kindness.

We were standing in the kitchen, the window open to the street below, the smell of something burnt drifting up from a neighbour’s balcony. I was halfway through tying my shoes when he said, lightly, almost offhand, “You’ll probably want to stay in tonight.”

I looked at him. “Why?”

He shrugged, already rinsing his mug. “Just a feeling.”

I went out anyway. I lasted forty minutes. By the time I came home, my chest felt tight, my jaw ached from holding itself in place, and the noise of the restaurant—cutlery, laughter, chairs scraping—had turned sharp. He was on the couch when I returned, a blanket folded beside him, the television paused.

“Hey,” he said, as if he’d been expecting me.

I remember thinking, with a strange relief, that someone knew me well enough to predict my limits.

By then, my grief had stopped feeling dramatic. It no longer collapsed me in public or made strangers lower their voices. It had become quieter than that—domesticated, almost. It moved through me in loops. Certain weeks felt thinner. Certain days arrived already heavy. I told myself this was what healing looked like: not absence, but pattern.

He came into my life after the worst of it. He never saw me on the floor of the shower or sitting in the car unable to turn the key. What he knew was the version of me that still went to work, still answered messages, still forgot—briefly—what had been taken.

That mattered to him, I think. That he met me when my grief was legible.

After that first night, the predictions kept coming.

He reminded me to eat on days I hadn’t realized I was skipping meals. He suggested movies that required no emotional effort when my patience was already thinning. He took over small decisions before they exhausted me: where to go, who to see, when to leave. When I asked how he knew, he’d smile and say, “I pay attention.”

It felt good to be paid attention to.

I started to believe grief had a timetable. That once you lived with it long enough, you could map it the way people mapped tides or migraines or weather systems. There were mornings I woke already braced, knowing—before checking the date—what kind of day it would be. He often knew too.

“You’ll be quiet today,” he’d say.

And I would be.

At first, I mistook this for intimacy.

We didn’t talk much about the loss itself. I didn’t like to. It felt overused, like a word repeated until it stopped meaning what it once did. He respected that, or seemed to. When he asked questions, they were practical ones: how long it had been, whether anniversaries were hard, what helped.

“I don’t want to push you,” he said once. “I just want to understand the rhythm.”

The word lodged somewhere in me. Rhythm. As if grief were a song you could learn by ear.

There were weeks when he arranged his work around me without saying so. Meetings rescheduled. Trips delayed. I noticed only later how often his availability aligned with my worst days. When I thanked him, he brushed it off.

“I know when you need me,” he said.

I wanted to believe that was love.

It wasn’t until I had a good day at the wrong time that something shifted.

It was a Tuesday in late autumn, one of the days I usually disappeared into myself. Instead, I woke light. Not happy—just unburdened. The city felt tolerable. I went for a walk before work. I bought coffee and drank it standing up, watching people hurry past. When I messaged him to say I’d meet friends after work, there was a pause before his reply.

“Oh,” he wrote. “Are you sure?”

“Yes,” I typed. Then, after a moment: “Why wouldn’t I be?”

Another pause. Longer this time.

“Nothing,” he wrote eventually. “Just surprised.”

That night, when I came home late and loose-limbed, he looked at me as if I’d mispronounced my own name. Not angry. Just wrong-footed. As though I’d arrived early for something he hadn’t prepared yet.

I told myself I was imagining it. Grief makes you suspicious. It trains you to look for meaning where there is none.

The thing I found wasn’t hidden.

That’s what unsettled me most.

I was borrowing his laptop because mine had died mid-sentence. He’d given me the password months earlier without hesitation. “I’ve got nothing you can’t see,” he’d said.

The file was open already. A calendar view, clean and precise. At first glance it looked like work—blocks of colour, notes in the margins. Then I saw my initial in the corner of several entries.

M — low energy
M — likely withdrawal
M — needs reassurance

I scrolled.

The entries went back months. Longer than I wanted to know. Some days were shaded lightly, others dark. There were comments—observations written in the same neutral tone people used for budgets or training plans. Triggers noted. Recovery windows estimated.

It wasn’t the existence of the record that stopped me.

It was how accurate it was.

My hands went cold first. That specific bloodless feeling that starts in the fingertips and crawls inward. The cursor hovered over a date I remembered clearly—a Sunday I’d spent unable to get out of bed, the kind of day that arrives without warning and leaves without apology. He’d brought me tea that morning. Had sat on the edge of the mattress and said nothing, just rested his hand on my ankle until I was ready to speak.

I’d thought he was being present.

The entry read: M — expected low. Prepared.

I kept scrolling. The weeks unfolded backward, each one annotated. Dates I’d marked privately in my head were there. Weeks I always dreaded, circled. Even the smaller fluctuations—the afternoons when I went quiet for no reason I could name—had been logged.

There was a pattern to the shading. Light blue for manageable days. Dark blue for what he’d marked as “withdrawal periods.” Some entries had multiple colors, as if he’d revised his assessment after the fact.

My breathing had gone shallow. I noticed it the way you notice you’ve been holding your breath underwater—only once your lungs start to burn.

I thought about the night I’d come home from that restaurant. How he’d had the blanket ready. How the television was already paused.

A different memory surfaced: the morning he’d suggested we skip the farmer’s market, the one I went to every Saturday. “You’re not up for crowds today,” he’d said. I’d been grateful. I’d leaned into his chest and let him decide.

The entry for that day: M — overstimulation likely. Redirect.

Something was reshaping itself inside me. Not anger yet. Something slower. The way water learns the shape of a crack.

I scrolled forward. Past dates I recognized into dates not yet lived. Lightly pencilled projections extending into next month. Question marks on some of them, a cautious humility in the notation. Even uncertainty had been anticipated.

The trackpad was slick under my thumb.

He came in while I was still staring at the screen. I heard him before I saw him—the particular rhythm of his footsteps, the slight pause in the doorway. When I looked up, he wasn’t surprised to find me there. He didn’t freeze or snatch the laptop away. He just stood there, watching me read, his face arranged into something careful.

“You weren’t meant to see it like that,” he said.

“Like what?” My voice sounded far away. Borrowed from someone else.

“Without context.”

I closed the laptop slowly. My hands were steadier than they should have been. That frightened me more than anything—that my body had already learned to perform calm.

“You’ve been studying me,” I said.

He frowned. “That’s not fair.”

“Then tell me what it is.”

He sat across from me, elbows on his knees, hands clasped. He looked tired in a way I’d never seen before.

“I didn’t want to miss you,” he said.

I waited.

“The bad parts,” he continued. “I didn’t want to be another person who disappeared when it got inconvenient. If I could see it coming, I could be ready.”

“Ready for what?”

“For you.”

It was said gently. Earnestly. And for a moment—just a moment—I almost let it soften me.

“Did you ever think to ask me?” I said.

He hesitated. “You don’t always know when it’s coming.”

That was true. And it frightened me that he knew it too.

That night, I lay awake beside him, listening to his breathing even out. I tried to reconstruct myself from memory. The version of me that existed before I knew I was being mapped. But grief had already made me doubt my own continuity. Now I couldn’t tell which responses had been mine and which had been performed for an audience I hadn’t known was watching.

In the dark, I tried to imagine grief without witnesses. How it might move if no one were tracking it.

I didn’t tell him I’d seen the rest of it. The projections, I mean. The guesses that extended forward into days not yet lived.

Instead, I started lying in small ways.

Nothing dramatic. I didn’t invent feelings I didn’t have. I just withheld them. When the familiar heaviness arrived, I delayed mentioning it. When it didn’t, I didn’t rush to explain. I let my responses arrive late. I stayed longer than expected. I left early without warning.

He noticed, of course. He always did.

“You seem different lately,” he said one evening as we washed dishes side by side. The water ran too hot. Steam fogged the window. “Not worse,” he added quickly. “Just… I can’t read you the way I used to.”

I smiled at the admission and handed him a plate.

“Maybe I’m just less predictable,” I said.

He laughed, but it came out thin.

After that, his kindness sharpened. He asked more questions, offered more adjustments. He watched me more closely, as if attention could compensate for surprise. I felt myself becoming careful, the way you do around someone who is fragile in a way they don’t recognize.

Once, he asked me what I needed.

I almost told him the truth.

Instead, I said, “I don’t know.”

It wasn’t a lie.

There was a night, not long after, when I woke from a dream I couldn’t remember with my heart racing. The room was dark, his back turned toward me. I lay there, breathing through it, waiting for the feeling to pass on its own.

It did.

In the morning, he said, “You didn’t sleep well.”

“I slept fine,” I replied.

He looked at me, searching for confirmation he’d learned to trust more than my words.

“Okay,” he said finally.

The calendar disappeared a few days later. Or maybe it didn’t. I never checked again. I didn’t want to know whether he’d deleted it or simply moved it somewhere I couldn’t see. The distinction felt meaningless.

What I did know was this: when grief arrives unannounced, it belongs only to the person it enters. The moment it becomes something else—something managed, contained—it stops being entirely yours.

I still loved him. I think that matters. Love doesn’t vanish just because it’s misapplied. It lingers, confused, trying to adjust.

We stayed together another four months.

It ended on a Thursday. Not one of my bad days. Not one of his predicted ones. Just a regular Thursday in March when the heating wasn’t working and we were both wearing sweaters indoors. I was making coffee. He was reading something on his phone. The kitchen was full of that particular silence that exists between people who’ve run out of things to say but haven’t admitted it yet.

I handed him his mug—the blue one he always used—and watched him take it with both hands, his fingers lacing around the ceramic the way they always did. He smiled at me. A real smile, familiar and warm.

And I realized I was waiting for him to say something predictive. To tell me how I’d feel later that day. To arrange his afternoon around an emotional weather system only he could see approaching.

He didn’t say anything. He just drank his coffee.

That was when I knew.

Not because he’d changed. Because I had. I’d spent so long making myself illegible that I’d stopped recognizing my own contours. I’d turned grief into a possession to be guarded rather than a process to be lived.

“I think I need to go,” I said.

He looked at me for a long time. Then he set down his mug.

“I know,” he said.

I wonder sometimes if he’d marked that day in his calendar. If somewhere in a file I never saw, there was an entry that read: M — likely departure.

I wonder if I’d simply fulfilled another pattern I hadn’t known I was following.

Grief still comes. Less rhythmically now. More like weather than schedule.

Some days it surprises me.

Those are the days I keep to myself.

The writer writes under a pen name, Iluka Chayan. Iluka Chayan (they/them) is a neurodivergent scientist and writer based in Brisbane. With a background in engineering and a passion for overlooked geopolitical narratives, they blend analytical precision with emotional depth in their literary work.