I grieve people who are still alive.
Not gone, not buried—just unreachable.
Still out there, walking and breathing and being loved by people who don’t know what they did to me.
Some of them hurt me by accident.
Some hurt me on purpose.
And some, I think, just didn’t care enough to stop.
I don’t miss them exactly.
I miss the version of me who still believed I was safe with them.
The version who bent backward, shrunk down,
or lit herself on fire just to keep the room warm.
I’m homesick for a place that isn’t real anymore—if it ever was.
A kitchen where laughter came easy,
a phone call without dread,
a holiday that didn’t taste like grief.
There’s a kind of longing that doesn’t fit into sympathy cards.
It’s not death—it’s erasure.
Not absence, but abandonment.
Not memory, but revision.
And sometimes I still catch myself hoping.
Hoping they’ll remember who I was before the damage.
Hoping I mattered enough to be missed.
But then I breathe.
And I remember:
I’m not mourning what I lost.
I’m mourning what I never really had.
⸻
If you’ve ever grieved someone who’s still alive—just know you’re not alone. That kind of pain is real, and it deserves space too.
Sometimes in dreams, this grief shows up as a locked door you used to have the key for… or a house that keeps shifting every time you walk through it.
In tarot, it’s the Five of Cups—frozen in front of the spilled cups, unaware of what still stands behind you.
You’re not broken. You’re just learning where to look now.
