There is a kind of loss I haven’t met yet, and I think about it more than I should.
Not death. I met death early, and it never asked anyone’s opinion. There was nothing in it to take personally, though it took me years to believe that. What scares me is the other kind. The chosen kind. You see someone every day. You build days together I can only call godlike, hours you couldn’t explain to anyone who wasn’t there. And then, slowly, politely, without a single thing going wrong, they get bored. Or they grow, and the growth points away from you. Nothing breaks. They just finish reading you, and put you down.
It hasn’t happened to me. I’m afraid of it anyway.
The dramatic endings scare me less. A betrayal has a villain. A fight has a subject. Anger is terrible, but at least it’s a task, something to do with your hands. Boredom gives you nothing to hold. When someone leaves because they’re simply done, the verdict lands on everything at once. It reclassifies the archive: every inside joke, every 3am conversation, every day you filed under unrepeatable. All of it becomes an era. Eras end.
And a daily person is not one loss. It’s a thousand losses wearing one coat. The first coffee. The person you turn to when something is too good to see alone. The person you tell things to, because the telling is half of the event. When they go, the strangest discovery is that the news of them going has nowhere to be sent. The address was them.
So I rehearse it. Some part of me believes that if I imagine the loss enough times, I’ll have prepaid it, and the real thing will arrive discounted. It doesn’t work. Rehearsal doesn’t inoculate you; it just moves the loss in early, before it has done anything to earn the room.
The fear offers me deals. The first: hold back. Stay slightly unknowable, keep one foot outside the door, give less so there is less to lose. But a guarded love is not a protected love, it is a smaller one, and you don’t get to keep the difference. The held-back part doesn’t wait somewhere safe. It never exists at all. The second deal is the opposite: perform. Be endlessly interesting, build the days higher, outrun the boredom. I trust this one even less. Nobody has ever performed their way into being unleavable, and a love maintained like a metric stops being love long before it stops being maintained.
Here is where I’ve landed, for now. Staying is not a system. There is no amount of godlike that locks the door, and since I’m someone who fixes things by building them better, this took me embarrassingly long to accept. But the door is the point. A person who cannot leave tells you nothing by staying. Every ordinary morning that someone chooses you over the rest of the world counts precisely because they could have not.
The fear and the meaning are the same fact, read twice. I’d rather be afraid.