Nobody leaves. That's the thing about this kind of ending in a place like a university. There is no moving away, no clean geographic break, no and then she moved to another city and it faded.
Same campus. Same friend groups, mostly. Same handful of buildings. Same meetings, occasionally.
Someone who once knew everything about you
is standing ten feet away
and you don't know if you're allowed
to ask how their day was.
I feel like a ghost.
what I actually missed
This surprised me and I think it surprises most people, so I want to be specific about it.
It was not the romance. It was not the physical part. Those are the things people assume, and they are the things that are easiest to talk about, and they are not what kept me up.
i dont miss the romance part as much as people think. i miss having someone to tell: you will not believe what happened today.
That's it. That's the whole grief.
Something mildly ridiculous happens to you on a Tuesday — the kind of thing that is not a story, that would bore anybody, that is only funny because of eleven previous conversations — and you reach for your phone with it already half composed, and there is nowhere to put it.
The thing you lose is not a person. The person is fine, the person is over there by the door. The thing you lose is a destination. An address where the small stuff went.
Memory
Reaching for the phone maybe forty times before the reflex stopped.
Feeling
Embarrassed, mostly. It felt like a disproportionate thing to be undone by.
What I learned later
It isn't disproportionate. The small stuff was the actual substance of it. Of course losing the small stuff is what it feels like.
being courteous at someone
The specific texture of this period was politeness.
We were kind to each other. Genuinely — this is not sarcasm. There was no hostility, no scene, no mutual-friends-choosing-sides. When we spoke it was warm. Someone watching would have said those two get on fine.
And it was awful, in a low, ambient, non-dramatic way, because every one of those interactions required me to perform a version of myself who had less information than I had. To be pleasantly unaware of four hundred small facts.
You can be in the room
and not be in the room.
That is what I meant by ghost. Not tragic — present without effect. There, and unable to act on any of it.
Everyone in this story except me is unnamed — her, a friend, my father, someone. It is my story to tell and theirs to keep. Names are not hidden in the page source either; they were never written down.