The missing can be particularly pernicious. It pries open your fingernails and crawls underneath, swimming just below your skin and settling like cement in your heart.
You spend all day trying not to think about it — about what his breath feels like on the back of your neck while you’re sleeping, about how his eyes wrinkle when they laugh, about how his hands were sore from holding yours for so long, about that dinner, about the way he sang in the car, about the time he stood behind you in line, snuck his hands around your waist, and locked his chin over your shoulder, about how it belonged there, about the conversations, and the silence, and how they were both just as full, about, about, about.
You busy yourself to forget, at least for now because the remembering hurts like woah. You write. You go out. You travel. You laugh even when you don’t feel like laughing. You run. You say yes when your friend asks you to go to the mall.
And then your song comes on — the song he sent you months ago — and the missing invades your consciousness, secures its flag in your otherwise preoccupied mind, and holds you hostage. You wish he was there to eat the rest of your pretzel because you’re full and don’t want to just throw it away, that you wish he were close enough to hold. You resent the people that rolled their eyes and told you this would be hard.
When you miss someone who lives in a far away place, you fall asleep holding pillows and learn to decipher the cracks and catches in his voice — the ones that tell you he really cares — because you can’t always see his eyes when you talk. You learn to trust him. More than anything, you remember that he’s worth it — worth the mental gymnastics, worth the text messages, worth the waiting ‘til next time.
“See you,” you’ll say every night, “and I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
