With you gone, there is no point. That’s what we’re always looking for: some sort of point, or an angle at which this all makes sense. You were the North Star, for all of us.
You may not have known it. We sure as shit didn’t tell you as much as we should, if we did at all. It was always more likely that you felt more like a punching bag than a guiding light, but you were. The jokes and the jibes, it was love, because we didn’t know how to say it any other way.
Now, without you, it doesn’t feel like there’s much point to going forward. It’s difficult to find a new moral compass at this stage of life.
Of course, you wouldn’t want us to feel this way. You’d tell us you were proud of us and to do what was in our hearts. You’d tell us you weren’t worth the upset – worth stopping our lives for – but that’s not true. You were. You always were. We just never did, and now it’s too late.
This is a theme in our lives: we’re always too late. We are hyper-aware. We see everything. We know everything. We understand how all the pieces fit together. And we take it all for granted.
We appreciate what we have, but from 10,000 feet. We don’t get in close and talk about feelings, because we don’t know how. We’ve traded humanity for screentime and the one thing, in all our awareness that we don’t understand is how deep the regret – and the guilt – will cut when we lose a piece of us we’d taken for granted.
The words are so simple – they’re all one syllable:
I love you.
We love you.
We’re afraid to use them. Now it’s too late.
