Missing someone is a peculiar thing.
It can bring a person back into your mind in extraordinary detail, while quietly removing all the reasons you had to leave them behind.
You remember their laugh.
A conversation that went on far too late.
The place you always sat together.
Some insignificant moment that somehow means more now than it did then.
What you may not remember quite as vividly is how tired you were.
Memory does not always lie.
But it does edit.
It keeps certain moments beautifully intact while allowing the sharper edges of pain to soften with time.
And so it is entirely possible to miss someone whilst knowing, somewhere quieter within yourself, that having them in your life was not good for you.
That can be confusing.
We tend to treat longing as unfinished business.
If someone still crosses our mind, perhaps we are meant to go back.
If we miss them, perhaps leaving was a mistake.
But the heart is rarely that tidy.
You can miss someone and still not want them back.
You can love what existed between you and know that everything surrounding it had become impossible.
You can grieve the ending of a relationship you were the one who chose to end.
There is no contradiction in that.
When we lose people, we lose more than people.
We lose routines.
The morning message.
The familiar place.
The joke nobody else quite understands.
The person who heard the small details of your day before those details became old news.
And sometimes, the person is not even what we miss most.
Perhaps we miss who we were when they were there.
Perhaps we miss the future we once imagined with them.
Or simply the comfort of knowing there was someone in the world who knew where we were without requiring much explanation.
So longing is not always an invitation to return.
Sometimes it is simply grief arriving late for something that was beautiful, but could not remain beautiful.
We are allowed to honour what something once was without bringing it back into our lives.
We can say:
Yes, I loved you.
Yes, there are things about us I still miss.
And yes, I still remember why I left.
Perhaps maturity is not learning how to stop longing.
Perhaps it is learning that not every feeling requires an action.
The heart can still ache for a door
the mind remembers exactly why it closed.
— Malek Ayoub