6 months ago, I sat in a coffee shop in Vancouver and wrote about love. The kind of love that holds space for you, where silences are comfortable, and conflicts are patiently resolved together. It’s the kind of love where you are loved exactly as you are, and it feels so natural that with time, you forget you have it and you forget what life was like without it.
I had that kind of love, and I am now without it.
That is all there is to the story really, you have something and then you don’t anymore. It feels like it should be relatively straightforward, a line from point A to point B. But the truth is, it is the most convoluting, deceptive path I have ever been on. One day I feel completely okay, and the next day I am sad in a Goodlife gym in Vancouver because the TV played an ad about a PS5 console.
This is such a novel feeling for me. I have never experienced anything like it. It is as intense as falling in love. The wave of emotions, the overthinking, debating whether you should text — except this time, you are making a stranger out of someone you know all too well, a best friend, whom you don’t actually want to forget. The thing with break ups is that you can decide to break up with someone, but you cannot decide to suddenly stop feeling towards them. At one point, it becomes such a habit to love someone, that you have to actively put in effort to not be reminded of them, to walk into a store and not notice the things they would like, to not experience life as if you were still sharing it with another person.
The last time I was in Vancouver, I had written the article because I missed him. He didn’t believe in missing people and I did. Back then, I didn’t understand why, but I think I do now. It is painful to suffer for something that isn’t there. But, I realize now that he wasn’t entirely correct. Missing someone isn’t a feeling you can choose to believe in. This isn’t Santa Claus. Missing happens to you whether you believe in it or not. It is the emotional experience of a physical void in your life. In French, we say “Tu me manques” which translates directly to “You are missing from me” rather than “Je te manque — I miss you”. Perhaps missing is not a conscious action we perform. You are missing from me. You are the subject of the sentence, I am the object of the verb, experiencing your absence. It is awfully poetic if you think about it.
Although we can’t choose to miss someone, we can choose how we respond to it. Missing someone can be a beautiful feeling, as long we experience it for what it is, then allow it to pass as it must. It is when we dwell on it and allow ourselves to exist in this state of perpetual lack, that missing becomes detrimental. Perhaps this is what he meant, he didn’t believe in this kind of missing.
These last few days in Vancouver, in particular moments that I think Marcelo would really love, I find myself staring at the doorway, and I picture him walking though it. It is a cruel thing to do to oneself after a breakup, but it temporarily assuages my thoughts of wanting to tell him: I wish you were here, I think you would really love this. I don’t allow it to dwell. After all, walking though a doorway takes no more than a few seconds. But it is enough for me, as I slowly shift my eyes away from the door, and back to the present moment, and enjoy it for myself this time.