Missing Something Doesn’t Mean It Was Right
Seasons come to an end for a reason.
Nostalgia doesn't always arrive the way you expect it to. It is not always soft around the edges.
Sometimes it hits without warning, in the middle of a normal day and it doesn't feel like warmth — it feels like pressure. Like your body is grieving something your brain hasn't officially acknowledged yet.
I'll be fine and then suddenly I'll miss something so specific it almost has a physical location.
Growing up, it was bonfires. I'd get a text “fire tonight” and that was all I needed to show up. I didn't ask what to bring or how long it would go or who else was coming. I just showed up and there they all were, and the fire was going. Someone's older sibling had made a liquor store run for beer that tasted terrible but nobody cared.
There's smoke in my hair for two days after. My eyes roam, half the night, waiting for a parent to appear and ruin everything. Laughing so hard at nothing that my stomach hurt.
The strange thing is I didn't have to look back to miss it. I started missing it while it was still happening.
There was a night right before I left for college. I was standing, surrounded by all of them, and I felt it. I felt happy but I was also grieving.
Like my body had clocked the ending before my mind would let me. I remember thinking, clearly, almost like a note to myself: “this is one of those moments. The kind people talk about later.”
I think about that night more than I probably should because of how it felt to be inside it. Like I hadn't had to earn my place there. Like existing was enough. Like just walking through the door was the whole qualification.
That's what I'm actually mourning when I feel this. Not the bonfires. Not even the people. But the way I didn't have to explain myself. I didn't have to start from scratch.
We still do it sometimes, those of us who are left. A dinner that runs too long. A bottle of wine that turns into two. A Saturday market where we wander and don't say much. A night where phones stay face down and nobody is performing and we just settle back into each other. Back into whatever it is we are when we're not trying to be anything.
But it's different now and I feel it even when I don't say it.
There's more catching up than living. More recounting than experiencing. We're narrating our separate lives to each other instead of building something together in real time. The connection is still real. It's just load-bearing in a different way now. It requires more maintenance, more intention, more choosing.
And I don't know exactly when that happened. I just know that it did.
My feelings have started to have much authority over my actual decisions.
If I miss them this much already, before I've even gone, doesn't that mean I belong here?
If imagining leaving makes something in my chest go tight, isn't that my answer?
If I miss something this much, it must be right. The ache must mean something.
But the longer I sit with it, the more that notion falls apart.
Because loving people has never required staying still and proximity has never been the same thing as closeness, even when it produces it.
A lot of what felt so effortless back then worked because we didn't have to try. We were in the same place and the same season in life. We didn't have to choose each other across distance, time zones or entirely different versions of who we were becoming. We just showed up and proximity did the quiet labor of connection on our behalf.
That's what nostalgia keeps from you. How much of the magic was just because you were all together in the same place, in the same moment.
I love being chosen without effort. I love being known without having to explain myself. I love not having to rebuild myself from the ground up in front of people who don't have the context for who I used to be.
It's real comfort and I'm not dismissing it. But it's not proof of anything.
If I'm being honest, I don't think what I'm most afraid of is losing them.
I think what I'm afraid of is finding out what survives without proximity doing the work. Finding out what we actually are to each other when we stop being in the same place.
Because what if distance changes it?
What if we love each other genuinely and still don't fit into the same life anymore?
What if both of those things are true simultaneously and neither cancels the other out?
There's a grief that lives in that question that feels almost disloyal to name. Like acknowledging it means I didn't value what we had.
Like I'm rearranging the past to justify wanting something different now.
But I don't think that's what's happening. I think this is just what it feels like when something real and meaningful doesn't follow you into the next part of your life because some things belong to specific seasons and the season is ending. Sometimes grief is just the price of growing past something that genuinely loved you back.
What I'm really afraid of, underneath all of it, is simpler and more embarrassing than I want to admit.
I'm afraid I won't be able to recreate this feeling somewhere else.
That the next connection I make will be thinner. That it'll take years to get to the part where someone can just show up at my door, walk into my kitchen, open the fridge without asking. That I'll spend a long time being impressive instead of just being known. That I'll have to earn my place everywhere I go for longer than I can stand.
Maybe that's true. Maybe it will be harder, slower and I'll have to build everything from scratch with people who don't have the history to understand why certain things are funny or why I relish the quiet.
But I don't actually know that.
What I do know is this—staying somewhere because it once held the last version of you is not the same as staying because it still does. And missing something is not evidence that it was right. It's just evidence that it was close. That it mattered. That you were present enough to feel it while it was happening.
I can carry all of it — the bonfires, the smoke, the way our laughs echoed through the neighbors yards — without letting it make my decisions for me.
We can love people without needing to live inside the version of life that made loving them so easy.
The past doesn't get to take control of the future. What we had was real and it was enough. It doesn't need to follow me everywhere to still have meant something.
We just have to be honest about what we're holding onto. Are we holding on because it feels right or because letting go is the scariest thing we've ever considered doing?