It rushed over me like an unwelcome flood, like all the sadness I’d piled up, all of it pressed into little boxes, finally came crashing down.
I had faced this sadness before. I faced it the way I face the most boring, uneventful day, without ceremony, without resistance. I welcomed the heartbreak, the what ifs, the feelings I hoped would transcend beyond walls and space, beyond whatever kept them from reaching where they were meant to go. And then, when I was done feeling them, I packed it all up. I wrapped it in a nice little rope…thread pulled from the very pieces of my heart that had shattered to make it.
Neat. Contained. Handled.
But tonight, on a night I was supposed to be forgetting, it came knocking anyway.
And here I am, crying. Not the composed kind of crying I’d gotten used to, the kind I could schedule and survive and fold neatly back into its box. Just crying, without a shape to it, without knowing yet what it was for.
It took a while sitting inside it before I understood: this feeling isn’t only about the box I kept hidden.
It’s from more than that. Because grief, it turns out, doesn’t stay in its lane. Once the box cracked open, it didn’t just let out the lover I never got to have, it let out everything I’d been quietly not-feeling alongside them.
So maybe, besides mourning the lover, I am also mourning the life I wish I had right now. I mourn the freedom I have yet to feel. I mourn the city I haven’t visited, the people I haven’t gotten to meet. I mourn every version of myself that exists only in the conditional tense, the one who would have, the one who could have, the one who is still, somehow, waiting.
And more than any of it, I mourn the reality that until the end of time, the muse of my soul was never meant to be mine.
Some nights, the sadness isn’t about one thing. It’s about all the boxes at once, the ones we thought we’d already closed.
i.