After Losing

"Mirror, mirror, upon the wall
Who are the cruelest of them all?"

I asked the mirror, my voice trembling. But this time, the mirror wasn’t showing me what I would see; it showed me what you would see instead.

What struck me is the notion that absence has a face. How loss teaches your body to recall shapes of absence. In the mirror, myself is not present; I see the shape of your shoulder leaning, your fingers tracing the edge of the frame, the crack in your brake line as if the glass were about to break.

I thought losing you would be loud, an action erupting with finality, a last hurrah of closure. It is not loud. It is quieter, perhaps. It is a door left cracked, your scent trapped in the curtain. It is dawn, waking in critical shock, reaching for someone, no one, reaching for no one; into the unnecessary sleep in early hours, recognizing the absence. The other side of the bed seems so big, not because it is, but because your body is not sleeping; your absence makes it big. Loss is not a door slinging shut; it is the remnant of echoing footfalls, leaving the last time.

Each day, I find small tokens of your existence in situations where you’ve never been: in how a stranger laughs, in the smell of rain absorbed into stones, in the sudden mass of icing on silence. Silence even feels odd, while once, it felt blank. Now, it feels whole, like a glass of water filled with everything I cannot return to drinking.

I always thought surrender existed only in love – surrender afterwards, too. Learning to love you was my structure. Missing you is my learning how to live amid the wreckage of the structure. The walls still hum with your voice. Once again, light lies still across the space as if your face is there to catch it.

Some nights I just wonder if I still love you or just that self that was my self when I loved you? Even the spectre of that stack of selves creaks me open. Even that memory bends the morning light across my skin in strange ways. People talk about closure like it is a door you lock. But closure is just carrying with you the key to a space long after the building has departed.

It is frightening how much of me still belongs to you—with how easily a smell or a song can disrupt my carefully constructed days. But I am learning, slowly, that survival is a type of devotion too. Remembering you is my prayer each day. Forgetting you, even for just a moment, feels like betrayal.

There is beauty in this cruelty. Loving you was fire, losing you is its ash. But ash is soft; it sticks. It stays close, even if it mars me while simultaneously reminding me of the warmth. I feel emptied; I feel anointed—a deserted altar where nothing is sacrificed except the burnt remains of what was offered, and the faint glow of what remains.

And yet all this every look, every touch, is worth the trembling I feel here in the emptiness of what we shared more than standing solidly in a world where you never existed at all. It is not a weakness; it is proof that I remember. Proof that I truly lived, if only for a short while. Proof that once, just once, I felt alive in a way I may never again.

I cannot foresee what my future will be—will time truly mitigate or exacerbate the situation? Will distance encircle me on its wide jaws? But I do know this much: lost is still a form of life. It is a life built not upon your existence but the shadow of your absence. That is still,  in some way, dignified.

Yours,

Within the ache and in the echo,
within the rubble and in the rain,
In what is left and what will never leave,
Until the last ember goes out,