I miss him in such a deep way, it's almost become subtle. It's not in my face every day anymore, it's just down in my gut, just there. It's something I live with now, a perpetual sense of loss. My new companion is the void left by my old one. Yet, I can't count how many times lately that I've felt happy or okay and then felt guilty, realizing it feels like continuing on after someone's died. It feels truly like that kind of grief. And sometimes still like I'm crazy and the whole thing probably never happened. That seems more like my mind still trying to make sense of it, whereas my body, my gut knows that I had someone close and I lost them.
I've had and lost love before, and that hurt, but not like this. The love wasn't like this, neither was the pain. At first, in the weeks following the end of the relationship, I had the sense that it had changed me and that it was in a way that no loss had before. It broke me down to a degree I can only remember one other time in my life coming close but it still misses. More stable now but still living with it all in my gut, I know that it changed me.
For a while in the relationship I'd get flashes of anxiety about losing him someday, to the end of life – I was that kind of in love. I was already predicting how painful it would be to have loved long and deep, then lose. And I experienced that, yet, I don't regret it. I thought I did, in the heaviest of the pain. But when you do love long and deep, it's not something that can simply be undone. Even after incomprehensible hurt, it did not go away. Days, weeks, and months have passed without a word, since we last touched, since I said goodbye not even knowing it was going to be the last goodbye; he chose to die to me, and still love persists in me. I suppose that's why I also felt anger: in spite of it all, I longed for him.
The strange thing is that lately I feel mostly okay. I also often feel a pit in my stomach and heavy tears overtake me. But a lot of my life feels okay. Only there's this big, vacant space in it, where something is undoubtedly missing. It's as if standing in your home, but there's no furniture or belongings. Everything sounds different and you feel peculiar wandering about in it. It's both foreign and familiar; it's a little normal and yet completely wrong. Disorienting. Yet it's reality.
It wasn't my choice, this reality, but I've survived it by a strand of hope I somehow had for not ending up alone. The tiniest belief that maybe someday when I choose someone, they will also choose me back; someday, when someone really sees me, they will value what they see. They will be scared to lose it – not scared to accept it. I've been sustained by the littlest, faintest hope that the ability to see and connect and put in the work will be recognized for its value and held onto with a grip both fierce and tender. That I'll be loved with the same unrelenting love that I can't help but have for the ones who take up space in my life. That someone will lay their head next to mine at the end of the day and feel awe and gratitude that I'm sharing this life with them.
