I’ve never had chocolate milk go bad in my apartment.
Regular milk? Absolutely. I know exactly what spoiled milk smells like — that very specific moment where you unscrew the cap, hesitate for half a second, and realize you’re about to have a deeply unpleasant sensory experience that immediately makes you question your ability to function as an adult.
But chocolate milk?
Never. Not once.
Apparently, my nervous system always finds it before expiration does.
I’ve learned that every single time I’m sad, that’s what I reach for. Chocolate milk. It’s not even intentional anymore. It’s instinctual. If things get bad enough and there’s no chocolate milk in the fridge, eventually, I’ll wind up standing under fluorescent lighting in a Wawa at some unreasonable hour holding a half-gallon of TruMoo like it’s emotionally prescribed medication.
And honestly, maybe it is.
Maybe everybody has something like that.
A softness. A thing the body reaches for before the mind fully understands why it needs it.
When I was little, mine was Bunny.
Not a creative name, admittedly, but in my defense, the front of him said “Some Bunny Loves You,” so I think childhood logic just stepped in and handled the rest.
I brought him everywhere.
He was one of those stuffed animals that slowly stopped resembling the thing it originally was because it had been loved too aggressively for too long — that weird light pink fabric that pills and thins from years of being dragged through life by a child who lacked both emotional regulation and object permanence.
Which, in hindsight, actually explains a lot about me.
I lost him constantly, which meant my mother spent a significant portion of her adult life retracing our steps through parking lots, department stores, restaurants, relatives’ houses, and at least one Kmart that I’m pretty sure no longer exists because I apparently viewed temporary separation from this horrifyingly over-loved beanbag rabbit as a psychologically catastrophic event.
I can still remember the feeling of panic in my chest when I couldn’t find him. Not normal kid panic either.
Existential panic.
The kind where your entire nervous system starts screaming before your brain can even fully process why.
And no matter what, my mom would always help me look for him.
Always.
That’s one of the strangest things about being an adult after both your parents die. You start realizing how many tiny acts of love were happening around you constantly that you never fully understood while they were happening.
Eventually, Bunny started falling apart.
The seams ripped first. Then one of his ears. Then the fabric around his neck started opening up. My mom taught me how to sew because he kept needing repairs often enough that outsourcing production to her no longer made sense in respect to the amount of time she already spent keeping him “alive” for me.
By the end, he barely resembled what he originally looked like.
The stitching was uneven. One side of his neck was sewn slightly lower than the other in a way that probably should’ve concerned someone. The words on the front had split apart so many times that it didn’t really say “Some Bunny Loves You” anymore.
But I still knew what it said.
That’s the weird thing about things you love long enough. Sometimes they stop looking recognizable long before they stop meaning something to you.
And the more I think about it, the more I’m beginning to realize that grief is probably a little like that too.
Not the sharp part. The later part. The quieter part. The part where life slowly rearranges itself around the absence until eventually the structure changes shape entirely, but the emotional weight underneath it somehow remains intact anyway.
Apparently, at thirty-nine years old, my emotional support object just evolved from a stitched-up beanbag rabbit into drinking straight from a half gallon of chocolate milk in the wee hours of the morning, eyes still half closed, still entranced by sleep to the point that it becomes difficult to tell whether the calories actually count or if the whole thing was only ever a dream.
Everyone talks about grief like it’s darkness.
Not a lot of people really talk about how sometimes it feels like overexposure. Like your emotions have been sitting too long in direct sunlight. Like your nervous system spent a day at the beach without sunblock, without protection, and now even normal life feels abrasive against your skin.
Not darkness. Exposure. And the difference feels substantial.
Darkness hides things.
Exposure reveals too much all at once.
When I was a kid, my family used to ride the MS150 every year. My grandmother loved it, so eventually the entire family wound up involved. My parents would pack up the car before sunrise, we’d drive to Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and then spend the day cycling toward Ocean City like a small emotionally unstable, deeply unprofessional cycling team fueled entirely by Gatorade, carbohydrates, and unresolved familial dynamics.
My dad drove behind us in the car with a bike rack attached to the back in case anyone got too exhausted to finish.
That was his role.
The sweeper.
The person making sure everyone made it to the finish line, whether by their own will or by the four wheels rotating beneath him as he followed closely behind, quietly on guard in case one of the people he loved could no longer lean on their endurance alone to carry them forward.
I didn’t realize how comforting that felt at the time.
I just assumed parents existed forever in the background of your life like structural support beams. Quietly load-bearing. So constant you stop consciously noticing them entirely.
The first handful of years I rode the seventy-eight-mile route. Eventually I moved up to the 103-mile ride.
I’m not really sure why.
Looking back, I think it was just about proving to myself that I could at the time.
One year, it rained almost the entire time.
Gray skies. Thick clouds. No visible sun whatsoever.
So naturally, I didn’t wear sunscreen.
There was no visible sun, so in the back of my mind, there was no danger of sunburn.
Because that’s how I perceived danger working at the time. I assumed if I couldn’t visibly see the thing hurting me, it probably wasn’t there. And in the absence of visible danger, there was no need to protect against it.
By the end of the ride, I had second-degree burns on my legs. The burns were so bad that I couldn’t bend my knees properly because of the swelling. The rubber grips at the bottom of my bike shorts had basically burned themselves into my skin like outlines.
I remember sitting there afterward, completely confused because how do you get that badly sunburned in the rain?
I didn’t see the sun once that day.
So how did I still succumb to its harmful rays?
What I didn’t realize at the time is that clouds don’t stop exposure.
Sometimes they magnify it.
That memory has felt increasingly metaphorical over the last few years of my life.
Some of the worst burns happen on days that never looked dangerous.
Caregiving does that. Burnout does that. Prolonged vigilance does that.
You spend so much time functioning that you don’t realize how overexposed your nervous system has become until one day somebody in front of you at the food store is trying to use coupons that need to be manually entered into the system on two entirely contradictory purchases, like fruit and fried food, and suddenly their inefficiency in both shopping habits and coupon acquisition is wasting time you’ll never get back — and you’re experiencing levels of internal rage that seem wildly disproportionate to the situation altogether.
Or you sit down on the edge of your bed for “just a second” and somehow twenty minutes disappear while you stare at absolutely nothing because your brain feels too overloaded to even decide what to do next.
Or you start driving around at two-thirty in the morning for absolutely no reason other than your apartment suddenly feels emotionally too small to contain you.
Sometimes, to know it’s raining outside, you actually have to open the blinds.
That sounds obvious until you realize how many years of your life can pass while you’re making assumptions about the weather without ever really looking directly at it.
Life feels like that sometimes.
You wake up, see daylight through the curtains, and assume everything outside must be manageable.
Then eventually something forces the blinds open.
And suddenly you realize the storm started hours ago.
My mother taught me repair.
Not just sewing Bunny back together.
Everything.
How to notice discomfort. How to care for people. How to soften things. How to tend to wounds before I even understood that’s what she was teaching me.
My dad taught me endurance.
Not in the motivational-speaker way.
In the “I’ll drive behind you the entire ride in case your legs give out” way.
The kind of endurance that comes with training wheels attached to it. The kind where you’re brave because somewhere deep down you still believe someone will come get you if everything falls apart.
My mother taught me how to repair things. My father taught me how to keep going long enough to eventually need repair.
Together, they accidentally taught me how to survive.
And now they’re both gone.
That realization lands strangely. Not just emotionally.
Structurally.
In the way I move through the world myself. In the way I keep moving. In the way I soften. In the way I notice pain before someone says it out loud. In the way I rebuild things before I’m fully done grieving the fact that they fell apart.
It feels like every step I’ve ever taken — and every step I’ll ever take for the rest of my life — is a step that was previously taken by one or both of my parents first.
If my life were a beach, I think I’d still be walking in the footprints they left behind.
My dad loved chocolate milk too.
Toward the end of his life, when the cancer was getting worse, he constantly drank chocolate Boost because it was one of the few things that still sounded appealing to him.
The overlap feels strangely intimate now.
Not profound exactly. Just painfully human.
I think that’s what grief eventually becomes when enough time passes.
Not constant devastation. Recognition.
You start finding people inside yourself in places you weren’t expecting.
In habits.
In humor.
In thought patterns.
In the way your body reaches for comfort before your mind catches up.
My father genuinely loved black licorice, which honestly should have been a stronger indicator to all of us that something neurologically suspicious was happening long before brain cancer entered the picture as a main character in his story.
There used to be jelly beans where the dark ones could either be grape or black licorice depending on the brand, and every single time I gambled emotionally on purple, I risked psychological betrayal.
He loved it.
I hated it.
And somehow that tiny stupid disagreement now feels weirdly precious to me.
I would genuinely give anything to accidentally eat one of those disgusting jelly beans sitting next to him again.
That’s the part nobody tells you about when both your parents die.
The world doesn’t suddenly become empty.
It becomes saturated.
You start noticing how much of them survived inside you without either of you realizing it at the time.
I still remember how my mom smelled.
Miracle by LancĂ´me.
I remember her standing behind me while I wrote college essays, scratching my back absentmindedly and playing with my hair while I stared at a computer screen pretending not to panic about deadlines.
That gentle feeling that trailed behind her everywhere she went.
That’s the weird thing.
I can remember the feeling of her presence almost perfectly.
But I struggle to remember her voice now.
With my dad, I have voicemails.
I can still hear him.
I can replay him.
But my mom died before I really thought to preserve ordinary things like that. I wasn’t walking around thinking one day a voicemail would become emotionally priceless.
And now there are moments where I would give almost anything to hear her say something completely insignificant again.
Not even something important.
“Call me back.”
“Have you had enough water today?”
“Are you on your way home?”
Something ordinary enough to prove she was still here.
Sometimes it’s chocolate milk.
Sometimes it’s black licorice jelly beans.
Sometimes it’s birds singing before sunrise while you sit awake at three in the morning trying to figure out who you are now that the people who built so much of you are gone.
Lately I’ve been waking up around two or three in the morning.
There’s a specific feeling in the air at that hour. Dampness. Coolness. The world feels softer then somehow. Less performative. Less loud.
And the birds start before the sun actually comes up.
That part always gets me.
The birds know morning is coming before anyone else does.
I think I’m somewhere in that hour right now.
Not fully in darkness anymore.
Not fully in daylight either.
Just existing in the strange in-between where everything simultaneously feels like it’s collapsing and rebuilding at the same time.
Like my nervous system ate ice cream too fast and now my entire existence has a brain freeze.
Like I’m grieving old versions of myself while accidentally meeting new ones.
Like one wall keeps collapsing while another version of me is already standing there holding a blueprint for how to rebuild it because somewhere along the way survival became architectural.
I don’t really know who I’m becoming yet.
I just know I’m tired.
Tired in that specific way where your body feels emotionally overexposed to existence itself. Like I don’t necessarily want darkness. I just want shade.
But underneath all of it, somewhere deep in my nervous system, there’s still this weird instinct toward softness.
Chocolate milk.
Birds before sunrise.
Opening the blinds.
Still reaching for comfort even after learning how fragile everything actually is.
And honestly, maybe that’s hope.
Not optimism.
Not certainty.
Just the quiet decision to keep reaching toward life anyway.
Copyright © 2026 Kimberly Beth Thomas. All rights reserved.