I don’t know his loss. I can’t. But I know what it means to carry something that doesn’t fade, something that stays lodged inside you, shaping the way you move through the world long after everyone else expects it to loosen its grip.
I know what it is to live with something that doesn’t leave.
I won’t ever stop flinching at raised voices. I know that now.
It doesn’t matter how many days pass without harm, how many places feel safe. That response lives in me. It was learnedearly, carved in deep, settled into instinct. My body reacts before my mind can catch up, before I can tell it that I’m fine, that I’m safe.
It doesn’t disappear just because I want it to.
But sitting here, my hand in his hair, his truth filling the space between us, I see something else too.
I see the space between feeling and action.
I’ve felt it before, though I didn’t have the words for it then. That brief moment where the instinct rises—fast, immediate—and there’s still a choice that follows.
I can hear a sudden sound and recognize it for what it is. A sound. Nothing more. I can feel the panic rise and choose where I go next.
The past doesn’t vanish.
It lingers. It echoes.
But it doesn’t get to decide everything.
His grief is love with nowhere to go.
Mine is a lesson carved into my body, repeated until it became instinct.
Different. Separate. But rooted just as deep.
Neither one disappears because time has passed. Neither one asks permission to exist.
They stay, carried forward, woven into who we are. And the real work isn’t about getting rid of them. It’s about learning how to live with them.
To feel them, to recognize them, to understand where they come from—and still choose how to move, how to act, how to keep going. To acknowledge their presence without handing over control.
To stand in the middle of it and say,I know you’re here. And then turn, anyway, toward what’s still waiting ahead.
“You don’t stop missing people.” The truth comes out simple, without hesitation. “You don’t grow past it.”
He looks at me through bloodshot eyes, his face wet, clinging to the words.
“It doesn’t fade just because time moves forward. Time changes other people. It changes what they expect to see. That’s all.”
His eyes move across my face.
“You don’t miss them less. You learn how the absence lives with you. You learn where it sits, how it moves through your day, how it shows up when you least expect it.”
I pause, letting it exist between us, letting him take it in.
“I’ll always react to certain tones,” I add, my own truth rising alongside his. “There are days when my body remembers fear before my mind catches up. It happens fast. Before I can stop it.”
“But I’m learning what to do with that moment. I’m learning how to stay. How to let the feeling rise and pass through without letting it decide everything that comes after.”
His hand tightens around mine for a brief second, a silent acknowledgment, then eases again.
“You don’t owe anyone an ending to this,” I tell him. “There isn’t a point where it all ties up and stops hurting. There isn’t a version of you that has to be finished with them.”
My hand leaves his hair, sliding down to his face, my palm coming to rest against his cheek. He leans into it. “You get to miss them for as long as you do. You get to talk about them whenever it rises up. You get to keep them with you in all the ordinary ways—in the songs, in the things they loved, in the habits that never left you.”
