This Is What Losing You Has Taught Me

I wish I could say that losing you taught me something deep and profound, anything worth losing you over.

I wish I could say that after losing the 6th or 7th person you never imagined losing, the lessons turned into anything but repetitive and vapid, no longer lessons, but painful reminders.

Losing you taught me how to feel like less of a person. Like a person not quite worthy enough to be a part of your life. It taught me that one day most people that I love will be nothing but an old message thread I scroll through wondering if we knew we’d lose each other, an old message thread that makes me want to go back in time and stay there forever. It hurt when you knew about my deepest fears and perpetuated them.

I want to write nasty things about you. I want to say nasty things about you. I want to think nasty things about you. But I don’t. I still think you are a beautiful human being. And the trouble in admiring someone who willingly decided they did not want you in their life anymore is that it makes you feel like less of a person. I want to feel like a whole human.

I don’t want to feel like leaving me behind somehow made you feel fuller.

I can’t imagine that I can sit here and feel less without you and you can feel more.

There is so much I want to ask you and so much I want to tell you. But when I think of talking to you, I know there is nothing I can say to you. So I sit here and miss you. I feel your loss like someone I love dying, but I mourn alone. Yesterday I dreamt that I was setting up someone’s burial. The internet tells me I am learning to let go of something that doesn’t hold any life in it for me anymore.

How do I tell the internet that I don’t want to let go? That it’s wrong? I want to revive the life you hold for me. I want to dream of planning a birth and not a funeral. I don’t want to feel delusional but I miss you so much that the only way I can soothe it is by convincing myself it’ll somehow stop when you come back. That you will come back.

I don’t know when it became my lot in life to miss people who want nothing to do with me,

to miss people who know how much I miss them, to feel tortured by those I love the most. When I date people, I know I will lose them eventually. It seems fair. When I lose a friend, it stings, and it is unexpected. I have no preparations in mind, and I’m hit with lost memories of both the past and the future. Losing a friend feels personal. Like you weren’t enough. Like they consulted others and decided it was the best for them to be without you.

Losing a friend feels lonely. I want to talk to you about you but I can’t. I want to tell you so much but I have nothing to say to you. I know your new life is beautiful, and I wish I could say karma is doing it wrong, but this beautiful life is what you deserve. I am your collateral damage and I’m learning to be okay with that.