Grief usually comes with funerals.
This kind comes with updates you don’t open.
With a name you still know by heart. With a life that keeps moving just no longer with you in it.
There’s a special confusion that comes from grieving someone who still exists. They’re out there. Breathing. Laughing. Living a life you’re no longer invited into. And somehow, that makes the loss heavier.
The Invisible Loss
There’s no permission slip for this kind of grief. No casseroles dropped off. No cards acknowledging what you lost. No language that feels quite right. People expect you to be okay because nothing ended in the way loss is supposed to. But something did end. And it mattered.
When You Can’t Hate Them
It would be easier if anger showed up. If there was betrayal. If there was a moment you could point to and say, that’s when it died. But when love is still intact, grief has nowhere to land. You don’t mourn the person. You mourn access to them.
The Cruelty of Proximity
They’re not gone. They’re just… unreachable. Close enough to miss. Far enough to hurt. You learn what it means to miss someone you could text but shouldn’t. Someone you could see but won’t. And that restraint becomes its own kind of ache.
What Grief Looks Like Here
It looks like restraint. Like silence chosen daily. Like loving someone quietly, without witnesses. It looks like accepting that closure won’t come from them because they’re still busy living a life you’re no longer part of.
This Is How We Break
Not by losing someone forever.
But by losing them while they’re still here.
Say The Unspoken 
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