When Someone We Love Becomes Someone We Lost

 Maybe it fell apart. Maybe people grew apart. Maybe someone got sick and never got better. Maybe circumstances out of our control damaged things beyond repair. 

Maybe circumstances very much in our control damaged things beyond repair.However it happened, most of us have experienced loving someone and losing them.

And there’s something indescribably difficult when someone we love becomes someone we lost. There’s something so unsettling about your soul being intertwined with someone else’s for an intense period of time, only to have that bond disintegrate.

What’s so difficult about this isn’t just the occurrence of losing someone we cared about more than anything in the world (though that’s extremely difficult). What’s so difficult is mourning that loss. What’s so difficult is having to go on living. What’s so difficult is having to pick up the pieces and realizing that with each shard we collect, we bleed a little more.

What’s so difficult is that this experience, these polar opposites of love and emptiness, can make us feel like the love we shared didn’t mean as much as we thought. Because, after everything was said and done, we ended up alone and hurting.

But when someone we love becomes someone we lost, it might actually be trying telling us that we’re all so much more connected than we think. That where we ended up is the lie and where we used to be and how we got there is the truth.

That if someone we loved can become someone who is distant or absent from our lives altogether, then the reverse is possible as well.

That all of us are, in essence, replaceable in the best possible way. Not in a cheap way. Not in a way that indicates we are not all unique, beautiful beings capable of forming unique, beautiful bonds with one another.

We’re replaceable precisely because we’re all connected. We’re replaceable because a complete stranger can eventually become someone we love.

This reality might just be the most beautiful thing of all.

And in a lot of ways, what we lost doesn’t have to be lost forever. What seems like it could only live in the past is capable of inhabiting our future. Not in the same way as the love we lost, but love is not as far away or as mysterious as it might seem.

Though it might be difficult to believe, the truth is that all of us are capable of loving again and we are capable of finding someone else to help us remember what love really feels like.

After all, the person we loved who eventually became the person we lost was once a complete stranger whose existence and beauty we couldn’t possibly comprehend...