Nothing We Can Do

Sometimes, we lose people. Sometimes, we never get them back. Sometimes, we don’t miss them. But, sometimes, we feel the ache every single day where we can’t feel: where they aren’t standing at our sides. Sometimes, that ache is so tangible; you could almost reach out and touch it. Sometimes, when we’re alone, we try to touch them, the lost.
Because a song will play and you can hear them singing the lyrics. Because you make cookies, and they taste just right because you didn’t confuse sugar and salt while dancing around in your kitchen with her. Because the hair on your arm stands on end the way it did whenever you accidentally bumped into him. Because you see the back of his shirt disappearing into the crowd. Because the sharp stench of burnt popcorn makes you think of the way she always screwed up the buttons on the microwave. Because, for a split second, they’re next to you again.
Then you brush the empty air. Then you feel like screaming because reality returns with crushing brutality. Then you die a little inside because you feel like you’ve lost them all over again. Then the pain comes rushing back, blocking out everything else. Then you realize no one can make you feel better, not really. Then you realize they can never come back. Then you know that you will feel like this again and again, and it may never go away.
You think of all the things you will never see again. The way they watched you while you were talking. The way she sat with you and called that person you hate names with a frowning face and swinging arms. That look when you both thought of the same thing at the same time. The exaggerated yawns and eye-rolls in math class. Her fingers flying across a keyboard. His calculated motion when turning a page.
And at night, you think about the things that mortify you. That one time when you joked about giving permission to have Facebook statuses set to “is dead.” The way you wished time away after you’d had a fight. The one time they told you they couldn’t take it anymore. The day they scared you by doing something stupid. At night, you wonder what you could have done different. You need to know if you could have saved them, but that voice deep inside says you never will.
Meanwhile, the world moves on. People forget, or learn to ignore the empty spaces, and it makes you angry, whether you hate them for moving on, or hate yourself for letting go. You’re told it’s okay to feel these feelings. That it’s normal, but no matter how many people go through the same thing you do, you’re always alone. Even if the name of your lost person is the same, you knew different people. You shared different jokes, different fears, different hopes, and different friends.
What scares you the most is forgetting. No matter how hard you try to remember, you know that, someday, you won’t remember the way he threw his head back when he laughed. You won’t remember the exact shade of green her eyes flashed when the sun hit them. You won’t remember if it was her left eye or her right one she couldn’t wink with.
And someday, you’ll wake up panicked when you can’t remember what he looked like. You’ll rush to your drawer where you kept the pictures all those years and you’ll cry with relief and shame when you find the two of you side by side, grinning, because how did you ever let yourself forget?
Sometimes we lose people. We don’t choose who they are, or how close they are to us. We can’t know how hard it hits us, or whether it will take our breath away. We won’t know until it happens if it really does feel like falling. We never want to, and our fingers are always crossed that we never do…but it does.
And the hardest part…the hardest part is that there’s nothing we can do.