The Right Person, the Wrong Time

There is a kind of ache that doesn't come with anyone to blame.

Most hard stories give you somewhere to put it. Someone lied. Someone left. Someone stopped answering, and you spent a month deciding what that meant. None of it is pleasant, but anger is at least usable. It gives you something to do with your hands while the thing hurts.

This one doesn't offer that. Nobody behaved badly. You met a person, something in you went quiet in a way it doesn't usually go quiet, and the only trouble was when.

I've noticed something in the messages people send me about this. They tell me the story, and then almost immediately they apologise for telling it. It was years ago. They're fine. They don't know why it came up.

I don't think the years are doing the work people expect them to do.

It doesn't behave like the other kind of loss

When something ends badly, there's a version of the story you can eventually tell where it makes sense that it ended. You assemble the evidence. You find the moment it was already over. That assembly is uncomfortable, but it finishes.

This doesn't finish, because there's nothing to assemble. The evidence all points the other way. Everything about it was right except for one thing nobody had any say in, and no amount of going back over it moves that one thing.

So instead of a conclusion you get a rehearsal. A conversation you have in your head on the train, or at 2am, or in the shower, where you say the thing you didn't say and they say the thing they didn't say, and it goes differently. You've run it enough times that you've refined it. You know exactly where you'd pause.

I don't think that rehearsal is a failure to move on. I think it's what wanting something looks like when there was never anywhere to put it.

Why I didn't write an ending

When I was writing this chapter, I kept trying to resolve it. Every draft wanted to arrive somewhere — a lesson, a reconciliation, some line that made the whole thing mean something in retrospect.

I threw all of them out.

Not because resolution is dishonest, but because I've never actually met anyone this happened to who got one. What people describe to me is much smaller and much more ordinary than a resolution. They describe still being glad it happened. They describe not wanting it undone, even now, even knowing how it went.

That turned out to be the thing worth writing. Not the ache — the ache is easy, everyone can hear an ache. The strange part is the gratitude sitting underneath it, refusing to leave, making no sense at all.

If this is yours

You don't need to have got over it for it to be fine that you didn't.

That's the whole thing I'd want to say. Not that it will pass, or that it happened for a reason, or that something better is coming. I don't know any of that and neither does anyone who tells you they do.

Only that the part of you still carrying it isn't broken. It's just still carrying something, because it was worth carrying, and nobody gave you anywhere to set it down.

"I don't think that rehearsal is a failure to move on. I think it's what wanting something looks like when there was never anywhere to put it."

If someone came to mind while you were reading — and I suspect someone did — this was written for you both.

"Maybe We Were Meant for Another Lifetime" — Chapter II of Four Seasons of the Soul — is out now. 🍂

Listen: https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/theechomindflow/maybe-we-were-meant-for-another-lifetime

The film premieres on YouTube today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6muPCtXHus