I am missing someone today. Not in a big, dramatic way. It’s softer, smaller, like when the kettle boils and there’s only one cup to fill.
I am missing someone today.
Not in a big, dramatic way. It’s softer, smaller, like when the kettle boils and there’s only one cup to fill. Or how the house is a little too quiet, like a room after someone has just left.
Life is quieter without them, more settled. And there is a part of me that wanted this — the calm, the early nights, the days that belong to me again. But they woke something up in me I’d lost long ago. We drove out to villages and coastlines. I ate things I’d never have ordered and stayed up talking past every sensible hour. I laughed in a way I hadn’t in a long time. What we had was good – so good – but it couldn’t hold the shape of an ordinary life.
…and so I had no choice but to close the door.
I’d have kept it if I could.
Some evenings the quiet has an echo, and today the echo sounds like missing.
And here is the thing I have been sitting with in that quiet: the missing comes with an instinct attached. Two of them, actually. And neither is really about them.
The first is simple, and almost embarrassing to admit. The feeling is uncomfortable. Reach out, and the ache would ease, for an hour, for an evening. They were, for a short while, the person who could soften the edges of a hard day. So the mind offers them up like a remedy: “you know how to make this stop.”
But easing the discomfort is not always the right choice. Sometimes the thing that would soothe you fastest is the very thing you had to walk away from.
We have turned not okay into a problem to solve rather than a weather to sit through.
The second instinct is quieter, and older, and I don’t think it belongs to me alone. Somewhere along the way we were all handed the same lesson: that we are supposed to be okay. We’re supposed to be happy, or at least fine, most of the time. And if we are not, if the sadness lingers past its welcome, then something has gone wrong and must be fixed, quickly, before anyone notices. We have turned not okay into a problem to solve rather than a weather to sit through.
But something crap happened. Several crap things, one after another, in the space of a life that had already asked a great deal of me. Clover. Daisy’s grief, and mine. The ending of something I had hoped would last. Of course I am not okay. Being not okay is not a malfunction. It is the honest, proportionate response to loss.
So I am trying, today, to do the harder thing. Not to reach out. Not to fix. Not to hurry the feeling toward the exit. Just to let it be here. To make it a cup of tea, in a manner of speaking, and let it sit at the table for a while.
Because I don’t think the ache is asking to be resolved. I think it is asking to be felt. It is the tenderness of having cared, still moving through me, looking for somewhere to go. And missing someone is not the same as needing them back. It can simply be the shape love leaves behind when it has nowhere left to land.
Clover taught me that love stays. I am learning, now, that staying does not always mean staying with someone. Sometimes it means staying with yourself: through the quiet, through the ache, through the long unglamorous work of being not okay and not running from it.
So I will miss them today. And I will not reach for the phone. I will let the evening be a little sad, and I will let that be allowed.
That, too, is love staying.