All the love I’ve ever felt is still within me. There are so many metaphors to choose from to describe it: A weight that slows me down and makes it hard to breathe sometimes. Charcoal embers that threatened to consume me once, but now just cloud my vision and leave me cold. Wounds that are scars some days and bleeding infections on others, aching either way.

The memories of all that love are thoughts I’m afraid to touch, but rise to the surface unbidden anyway. And it’s been long enough now that I realize it’s mostly not the people I miss. It’s the possibility they represented, their validation of my hope that I deserve love, their walking corroboration that we live in mostly overlapping realities and I’m not here alone in my head.

Because I feel alone. And some days that’s okay, because it’s a quiet knowledge rumbling beneath the surface as I do other things. And some days it feels unbearable, as though I’m dragging myself through the rest of my life in solitary confinement.