No Funeral For This

I think mourning the loss of someone who is still alive is a far crueler agony than death.With death, grief is permitted.You know they are not coming back.You know, more often than not, that they did not choose to leave you.But this—this is grief without permission.And I do not mean this only in the romantic sense.To mourn a friend who still breathes, who still walks the same earth as you, is a pain too heavy to name.A friend who bore your burdens as their own.Who sat with you through storms and, when they could not pull you out, at least pointed toward the light.A friendship so sudden and deep it felt orchestrated—divine, even—only to end quietly, tragically, without spectacle.It ends not with betrayal, but with understanding.That is the cruelest part.For the sake of dignity, I said I understood.And perhaps I did.But understanding does not soften loss; it only makes it lonelier.To survive, I tell myself stories.That some people are only meant for certain seasons.That beginnings ordained by fate may also have ordained endings.I dress grief in fables and parables, hoping meaning will dull the ache.It does not.Perhaps if the friendship had ended badly, I could have turned this pain into anger.Hatred is easier to carry than sorrow.But there is nothing to hate here—only absence.Sometimes I wish I had never opened the door.Vulnerability, once shared, becomes a wound when withdrawn.What once felt like refuge now feels like exposure.I try to measure gain against loss, to reason myself into relief.But no outcome is gentler than this one.No lesson compensates for the silence left behind.If I was never meant to keep it, why let me taste it?If everyone leaves, why teach me how to stay?If love will not come, why give me the hunger for it?The pain is punishment enough.I wonder if there are people untouched by this longing—some neurological mercy that dulls the desire for connection.If such people exist, I envy them.Because this hurts.A great deal.Why let people into my life if they are not meant to remain?Why offer something pure, only to reclaim it once attachment has taken root?Grief is love with nowhere to go, but how does one mourn someone who is still alive?There's no funeral for this. Ah.The quiet alchemy of writers.My pain is not wasted.I bleed onto the page, and the world calls it red ink.

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