No one tells you that some of the most destabilising losses won’t feel like loss at all – just a persistent sense that your life is slightly misaligned. Because you don’t really realise someone has become a habit until your day keeps reaching for them and coming up empty.
It happens slowly, without intention. Someone slips into your routine so thoroughly that their presence stops feeling like a choice and starts feeling like an assumption. They’re in the spaces that don’t require effort – the moments between classes, the walk home, the long stretches of studying where very little is said and everything is understood.
And then, at some point, that assumption breaks.
Sometimes it’s a breakup. Sometimes it’s distance. Sometimes it’s your best friend’s graduation, relocation, or the quiet drifting apart that no one ever names. And sometimes it all overlaps, layered so tightly you can’t separate one reason from another.
I’ve learned that this kind of loss hits differently when you’re someone who feels things deeply.
I’m emotional – not in a way I consider a flaw, but in a way that means I notice absence acutely. I carry things longer than most people seem to. But I don’t think that’s something to outgrow.
Because I feel deeply, I also love deeply, and I’d rather live that way than learn how to feel less.
But what’s difficult isn’t always losing a person. It’s losing the version of your day that was built around them.
University makes this kind of absence harder to escape. Our lives are built on repetition – the same schedules, the same buildings, the same paths across campus. When someone becomes part of that repetition, their absence doesn’t fade – it reappears daily, embedded in the structure of your life.
Distance complicates it in a way that’s difficult to explain without sounding dramatic. The person still exists. You still care. But what once required no effort now requires coordination. Presence becomes conditional. Comfort turns into something scheduled, mediated through screens and time zones. Missing them isn’t overwhelming – it’s constant.
Breakups carry a similar weight. You don’t just lose the person; you lose the assumptions you made about the future without realizing you were making them. The certainty of their presence disappears, and your days feel unanchored in ways that are hard to articulate.
University teaches you that something can matter deeply and still be temporary. That love – romantic, platonic, familiar – doesn’t lose its validity just because it ends.
What’s unsettling about losing someone who became a habit is how little space there is to grieve it properly. You reach for your phone and pause mid-motion. You accomplish something and realise you can’t text the person you thought of immediately. You experience absence in small, ordinary moments that don’t look like grief but accumulate anyway.
I assume the habit fades eventually. People say it does. I hope they’re right.
Or maybe what really happens is that the absence becomes integrated – folded into the structure of your life so seamlessly that it stops surprising you, even if it never quite disappears.