to the one who should have been here
there are so many things that have happened since you left that I have wanted to tell you about, and sometimes I still turn toward the empty side of the room with the beginning of a story already on my tongue, only to remember that there is no longer anyone there who knows why it matters. I wonder if you would have liked the rain we had last week, or the little café that opened near the corner, or the song I heard yesterday that sounded so much like the kind of thing you would have played until I hated it, and it breaks something in me to realize that the world has continued producing new things for you to never see.
I think that is what hurts most, not simply that I lost you, but that I keep living through moments you will never know existed; birthdays you weren't there for, sunsets you never saw, jokes I couldn't tell you, mornings when I woke up and for a brief, terrible second forgot that I was alone. I have become a collector of things I cannot give you, storing little pieces of my life as though one day I might finally find a way to place them in your hands and say, look, this happened while you were gone, and I thought of you.
Sometimes I am afraid that one day I will stop doing that, that I will see something beautiful and my first thought will no longer be you, and perhaps that is the part of grief nobody warns you about: the possibility that healing might feel like betrayal. So I keep your name in the quietest parts of my life, where no one can take it from me, and when the night becomes unbearable, I let myself imagine that somewhere beyond all the distance between us, you are still listening, still knowing me, still understanding why I cannot quite learn how to live as though you were never here.
If I could have one thing from you, I wouldn't ask for another lifetime or even another year, because those things feel too impossible now; I would ask for one ordinary evening, one where neither of us knows it is precious, where you are beside me and the hours pass without asking anything of us, where I can look at you without knowing that one day I will have to remember the exact shape of your face instead of waking up to it.
I think I could survive losing you again.
What I cannot bear is the thought that there will someday be a world in which I no longer miss you.
for dear : @anpqel
