I. The Departure
The end didn’t arrive like a scream or a storm. It came like an exhale held too long, soft and suffocating, pressing gently, then relentlessly, against the fragile throat of what we once were. There was no sharp breaking, no crescendo to mark the fall. It simply decayed—a bruise beneath the skin, spreading in slow silence until nothing remained, but the quiet rot.
People imagine endings as something you can point to, a single, clean rupture—the slam of a door, the strike of a match, but this was no such mercy. This was the tide retreating under a sky bruised with dusk, so gradual and unassuming that by the time I noticed it had gone, I was already stranded, ankle-deep in salt and ruin, unable to remember when the leaving began.
There were no last words to punctuate the silence. Only that silence itself—a living thing, stretching vast and unyielding, pressing into the space between us. It hummed with the weight of everything we never said, everything we didn’t know how to say. I wonder now if the air between us carried its own gravity, pulling us apart even as we stood side by side, strangers sharing a haunted room.
I have learned there is no ritual for mourning something that dies while it still breathes. What we had did not shatter—it dissolved, thread by fragile thread, until the shape of “us” was no longer anything I could hold. What remained was a phantom, a presence I could feel but no longer touch, a memory that trembled on the edge of vanishing.
II. Artifacts
Here is what’s left:
- A playlist of songs that once felt like fireworks, but now play like eulogies.
- A half-finished conversation about something trivial like ice cream flavors or why autumn feels like coming home.
- An unopened Instagram DM, still waiting in the void where you laughed alone before sending it to me.
- A box of photographs and t-shirts buried beneath years of dust, their edges curling like leaves left too long in the sun.
- The shape of your absence: sharp, heavy, a phantom limb I reach for out of habit, only to find nothing.
These are the relics of a life that no longer exists—artifacts of a time when we were infinite, or at least foolish enough to believe we could be. They are shards of something beautiful and inexplicable, the kind of beauty that leaves you breathless when it’s gone.
III. The Physics of Loss
Loss does not obey the rules of time. It does not travel in straight lines from hurt to healing, does not move obediently from point A to point B. It folds back on itself, spirals inward, explodes outward. It is a galaxy collapsing, a supernova reforming, over and over again.
Some days, the weight of it feels unbearable, like gravity turned ruthless, dragging you down until even breathing feels impossible. Other days, it’s a feather-light thing, so fleeting you almost forget it’s there—until a stray song, a familiar scent, a stranger’s laugh that sounds like theirs, brings it crashing back with the force of a thousand unshed tears.
Loss doesn’t disappear. It reshapes itself, bending the light of your life around it, a black hole you learn to navigate but never escape.
IV. Seasons
Not all people are meant to stay. Some come into your life like spring, coaxing you out of your winter husk with soft sunlight and wild blooms. For a while, it feels infinite, the way spring always does—a dizzying, intoxicating lie.
But seasons change. Spring bleeds into summer, summer fades into autumn, and before you know it, the people who felt like warmth in March become shadows in December. It’s cruel, isn’t it? How something that feels eternal can vanish so easily, as if it was never real at all.
Maybe that’s the point. Maybe the beauty is in the fleetingness, in the knowledge that what you had was precious precisely because it was never yours to keep.
V. A Funeral Without a Body
How do you grieve someone who still walks the same streets, breathes the same air? How do you bury what refuses to die?
There is no ritual for this kind of loss. No eulogy, no prayers, no pallbearers. Just the slow, aching acceptance that what once was is no longer, and what could have been never will be.
So you hold your own quiet vigil. You light candles in the back of your mind, lay flowers on the altar of memory. You whisper goodbye to the wind, hoping the universe carries your words to wherever they are.
VI. The Weight of Time
They tell you time heals. It doesn’t. Time doesn’t erase the ache; it simply teaches you to carry it differently. The sharp edges dull into a quieter kind of pain—a hollow thud instead of a piercing cry.
And yet, time is treacherous. Just when you think you’ve made peace with the past, it finds you again. A song on the radio. The scent of rain. A stranger with their smile. Suddenly, it’s there, flooding you with all the things you thought you had learned to forget.
Time doesn’t take the love away. It just transforms it into something quieter, something you carry with you—not because you want to, but because you don’t know how to put it down.
VII. The Aftermath
The space they leave behind is not empty. It’s full of echoes—of laughter that once filled the room, of arguments that left their mark, of dreams whispered in the dark. It’s a space haunted by what was and what could have been.
However, slowly, without realizing it, you begin to fill it with something else. New laughter, new dreams, new people who don’t carry the same shadows. And one day, you look at the space they left and realize it is no longer a void. It is something else entirely. Something new. Something yours.
VIII. The Epilogue
Here is the unvarnished truth: Some people are meant to leave. That doesn’t make their presence in your life any less miraculous, though.
They came like the first notes of a song you didn’t know you needed. For a while, they were everything—a compass, a mirror, a fire to keep the cold away. Now their absence hums through you like the melody of a song that lingers, even after the music is gone.
You carry them—not as they were, but as they shaped you. Not in the jagged pieces they left behind, but in the way you’ve learned to smooth those edges, to build something beautiful from the wreckage.
This is the paradox of loss: it tears you apart, but it also remakes you. It carves out spaces, yes, but it teaches you how to fill them—not with replacements, but with echoes that grow into something new.
You’ll find them in the quietest places; the tilt of your head when you laugh, the books you reach for in sleepless hours, the strength you didn’t know you had until you needed it. They are gone, but they are stitched into the fabric of you. A thread in the tapestry of who you’ve become.
And one day, without knowing it, you’ll see them there—not as a wound, not as a shadow, but as a part of the whole. You’ll realize they didn’t leave you empty; they left you open. Open to love, to loss, to the terrifying beauty of impermanence.
Here’s to the ones who leave, and to the ones we become because of them. Here’s to the ache that reminds us we are alive, and to the love that refuses to be forgotten.
Because maybe forever isn’t holding on—it’s letting go with grace.