I Keep Catching Myself Missing People Who Are Still Here
On standing outside a moment you're still inside, and loving people so much you're already sad to lose them.
I keep catching myself missing people who are still here.
Not in a distant way. In the middle of a conversation, a dinner, a laugh, something in me quietly separates from the moment and stands just outside it, already grieving what hasn’t ended yet. It happens most with family. Watching dad take a few extra seconds to get up from his chair. Hearing mum catch her breath on the stairs. My mind goes somewhere I don’t want it to go. To the permanent version of this feeling. To the day this becomes a miss that doesn’t end.
And I hate that I go there. But I can’t seem to stop.
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I’ve spent years trying to hold onto moments. The video camera. The film prints. The journals. A decade of hard drives stacked with voices and faces and ordinary Saturdays I refused to let disappear. If I could just preserve enough of it, I thought, maybe losing it wouldn’t hurt as much. Maybe the archive would soften the absence.
A moment, once it’s gone, is gone. No camera brings you back inside it. You can hold the record. You can’t hold the moment.
The strange thing is that writing is the one place I’ve found that actually helps. Not because it solves anything, it doesn’t. But because it lets me go all the way into the feeling instead of around it. Most people retreat from the hard unknowns. I’ve found that the further I dive in, the more bearable it becomes. The page absorbs what I can’t hold anywhere else. Tears on the table, ink blurring on paper, and somehow on the other side of it, things make a little more sense
· · ·
What I’m learning, slowly, imperfectly, is that the missing and the loving are the same thing wearing different clothes. I miss them because the moments are that good. Because the people are that important. Because what we have is genuinely worth grieving in advance.
But I’m also learning that the fear of losing a moment can pull you clean out of it. And a moment you’re not inside isn’t really yours to keep anyway.
So I’m working on it. Living in it. Camera down sometimes. Pen capped. Just present.
To love something so much that you’re already sad to lose it, that’s not a problem to fix. That’s just what it looks like when something actually matters.
