Since my friend Kirsten suddenly died in June, grief is the cadence to every song I listen to or sing — happy, or sad, or pensive. It is the concrete that encases my feet as I slog through each and every step I take.

It is like the smell of autumn, everywhere, yet intangible and invisible. Yet it stealthily and inexorably crowds out the essence of summer as though it never was. Grief is in the time passing on the clock, and it is in the dates that race up to me and then are somehow weeks in the past while the days are loud and slow and empty.

Grief seasons every bite of every meal I eat, like an ingredient you know is there but cannot identify. It is tasteless yet somehow alters the taste of every single morsel.

Grief makes me cry every morning when I drive to work and grief makes me cry every evening when I drive home from work. And grief is waiting for me at my doorstep when I get home. It lurks around corners and somehow surprises me even though it is there, always, curled up at the base of my neck like a dead mink. Grief muffles my ears and blurs my eyes and sifts into my lungs so I cannot take a full breath. Grief wakes me in the morning and crawls into bed with me at night. Grief provides the soundtrack for my dreams.

Everywhere is my friend, superimposed over the most mundane moments. She is in the gas price at the pump that I want to complain to her about. She is in the leaves that drift down in the October sunshine that I want to see with her. She is in the shoes she gave me when I put them on to run to the store. She is in the air fryer I bought based on conversations we had about how amazing they are.

She is in the rug on my living room floor that she bought for me as a housewarming present and she is in the cup full of chopsticks and metal straws that I borrowed from her years ago, that lives on my countertop and that I see every single day.

She is in every bite of food I cook for my child, for whom she fought to keep alive right alongside me for 19 whole years, from the moment she laid eyes on her, newly born and still warm from my body. She is in my children whom she helped me raise. She is in every worry I have for them and she is in every joy they bring to me.

She is in the car with me when I sing her favorite Brandi Carlile song, just like we did in June on the way to Aquinnah to buy bread, in a car filled with love.

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And she is in the dime I find on the ground when I am missing her.

And nowhere is my dearest friend. She is not on the mountaintop next to me to see the clouds so puffy that they look fake. She is not outside next to me, bundled in a blanket at midnight when I see a meteor flare across the sky. She is not with me to help me pick out the perfect wind chime. She is not at the farmers market with me as I buy too-expensive wild honey and lemon squares. She is not in my phone in a new long voicemail rant that makes me laugh, and that ends with “I miss you and I love you.” She is not curled up in her bed with me as we scroll through Instagram and she is not laughing as I give her a hand massage because she has sacred hands.

She is not in the calendar full of days and weeks and months and years stretched out ahead of me, so lonely and dull, and without her laugh and her fierce love of me and of life itself.

And she is not with me now when I sing her favorite Brandi Carlile song, alone in a car full of sorrow.

Tolley M. Jones lives in Easthampton. She writes a monthly column and can be reached at columnist@gazettenet.com.