The Shape of What’s Missing
A post for those still learning how to grieve what didn’t stay.
There are heartbreaks that shatter, and then there are heartbreaks that settle.
The kind that don’t announce themselves with wailing or drama, but quietly rearrange your furniture. They change the layout of your days. You’ll reach for a mug that isn’t there anymore. You’ll forget the joke was only funny when they said it.
You’ll still think about telling them something.
And then remember.
And that remembering, God, it’s like swallowing glass in reverse. The cut comes after the swallow. Delayed ache. A pain with manners.
No One Teaches You How to Grieve the Living
They’re still out there. Living. Laughing. Reposting stories. Maybe falling in love with someone new. And you, what are you supposed to do with that?
You want to be better. To be evolved. You want to send love and light and healing. You want to be the person who says, “I wish them the best.”
But sometimes, if you’re honest, you don’t.
Sometimes you wish they would ache a little too.
Just enough to see what you’re carrying.
That doesn’t make you bitter. It makes you real.
And being real is harder than being righteous.
They Didn’t Break You. They Rewrote You.
Here’s what no one talks about: heartbreak is not about becoming less. It’s about becoming different. You’re not broken. You’re rearranged.
They were a chapter, not the whole damn book.
A chapter you reread too many times, maybe.
A chapter you dog eared, underlined, cried into.
But still, a chapter.
Not the ending.
What Stays After They Leave
What stays is your capacity to love that deeply.
What stays is the song that makes you close your eyes in the car.
The way you now understand the power of silence.
The fact that you can miss someone and still not go back.
What stays is you. And that is no small thing.
For the One Reading This Who’s Still Healing
Maybe it ended without closure. Maybe they chose silence over softness. Maybe you never got to say what you really felt.
So let me say it for you:
You were not too much.
You were not too sensitive.
You were not imagining it.
Your love was real.
Your grief is valid.
Your story is sacred, even the chapters that hurt.
And One Day…
One day, you’ll sit across from someone new and realize you’re no longer comparing. No longer flinching when they ask how you feel. No longer gripping your heart like it might escape your chest again.
You’ll realize you survived something you didn’t think you’d get through.
You’ll be proud of the version of you who kept going.
And maybe, just maybe, you’ll thank the one who left… for making room.
For all this becoming.
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🕯 To healing, and all its imperfect forms.
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