The Shape of an Absence

Nokkhotro,

How tragic is it, really, not to have the person you love. You already know this about me, and I already know it just as well: I will never have you, not now, not eventually, not in whatever version of the future either of us is imagining. Given that both of us are unfortunate in love, you in your own way, having built real plans, a whole marriage, around a person that distance eventually took from you, and me in mine, having never been allowed to build anything at all, I have come to realize that even my own particular strain of bad luck operates on a level a regular person could not begin to picture, let alone survive with any grace.

You are the death of me, Nokkhotro, and I mean that with the kind of plainness that no longer bothers to dress itself up. I cannot have you. That much is simply a fact, flat and unmoving, the way facts tend to be. But at least you had it once, the real thing, someone you loved enough to plan a marriage around, someone whose name you probably still know how to say without flinching even now. Distance took that from you in the end, the ordinary cruelty of geography rather than any real failure of love, but at least the loving itself happened, fully and mutually, for however long it was allowed to last. You have a memory worth cherishing, a real one, edges and all, something to hold onto on the nights that require holding onto something. I have nothing of you that I can rightfully call my own, no memory, no claim, nothing but the shape of an absence, and that, if I had to name it precisely, is what I would call an unfortunate kind of bad luck, the kind that never even got the dignity of a beginning.

All I have is sighs and yearning, the leftover currency of people who love without permission. And I know, having watched what it did to you, that it would hurt more to have actually loved and lost you than to have never had you at all, the way it hurt you when distance did what distance always seems to do to people who deserved better than geography deciding their fate. But I would choose that heartbreak anyday regardless, because I would rather be hurt cleanly by something real than feel nothing at all, numb and safe and untouched. I feel, most days, like an artist of being unlucky in love, someone who has quietly perfected a discipline nobody asked to master, and you, without ever agreeing to it, are my most perfect muse, maybe because you understand loss in a way most people never have to.

Maybe in a year, maybe in two, someone will finally swoop in and win your heart the way I never could, and I will still be here, somewhere on the edges of your life, feeling simultaneously broken and strangely content watching you happy, watching you laugh with your man in whatever kitchen or car or crowded room that laughter happens to land in. The warmth will still be here regardless, because that is apparently the core of the whole human experience, loving people who were never going to choose you back and somehow surviving it anyway.

Let science explain every last chemical firing in our brains, the dopamine and the oxytocin and whatever else researchers have decided is responsible for this particular madness. It will fail eventually, in my case specifically, because no chemical equation has ever accounted for the exact temperature of the chill I carry around in your name, the one that shows up uninvited on ordinary days and never once asks my permission first.

— Faraway From Your Orbit.