May was hard. Heavy in the chest. Hard. The kind of hard that sits behind your eyes and waits. As if it knows the perfect moment to let a single. Heavy. Tear fall.
I found myself reliving something I thought I’d buried in the corridors of my final year in college. A kind of loss I wouldn’t wish on anyone. Not even once. And yet. Here I was. Again.
It cracked something open. Left me picking at old wounds with new hands. Left me asking questions I didn’t want answers to. Is it me? Am I the problem? Why do the people I love the deepest. The hardest. The most. Always find a way to leave? And why does it always hurt like this?
The questions don’t leave. I’ve kept them close. Too close. Like breath on glass. Trying to see what lives beneath the fog. Its shape. Its bones. Its skin. Then I push them away. Just enough to test if maybe I’m only haunted because I want to be. Or worse. Because I deserve to be.
And still, I wonder. Why don’t we talk about these endings like we talk about the rest? Why don’t we grieve these endings like we grieve the rest? Why don’t we mourn the people who are still alive but are no longer ours? Why do we pretend it didn’t happen? That it didn’t hurt? Why do we downplay what was real? The laughter? The love?
When they stop showing up for the little things. The voice notes. The late-night rambles. The quiet “I need you.” When they stop noticing the shift in your energy. Stop tagging you in posts that scream, ‘this is so us’ and start speaking to you like a stranger politely waiting for a turn in conversation. When they no longer tell you when something good happens. Or something bad. When you’re no longer the first to know. Not even the eighth.
Because what do you say? They just stopped choosing you. And maybe that’s the part that hurts the most. There’s no funeral for the still-breathing. No eulogy for someone who just stopped showing up.
So I sit with it. This ache. This once-was. Trying to remember them without splintering. Trying to remember me without shrinking. Trying to answer that same old question without flinching.
Who do I need to become to stop bleeding when people leave without saying goodbye?
How can I forget someone who gave me so much to remember? ~Anonymous