On Missing People
Thoughts on Longing in the Time of COVID
Sand is weird. It’s a thought I have while sitting on the beach.
Seemingly similar and uniform, each tiny grain of sand has its own identity. Maybe it’s a piece of coral or shellfish, or maybe some rock or metal - each a piece of dead or unlived thing that’s met the waves of the sea; each a remnant of some original structure, eroded and whittled over a few thousand years; each tiny grain an idiosyncratic fragment of lives and eras no longer remembered.
As I run my hands through the sand surrounding me, the pieces separate easily - individual grains falling weightlessly and silently through the gaps between my fingers…unattached, unburdened, and uncaring.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about longing - the remembrance of moments past and the ideation of moments that could be, of the emotions that surround them, and the people who contribute.
I’ll find myself pausing at a memory of a person. Here, I spot someone with The Power of Myth - my last copy I gave to a guy I used to care about. There, I stare at a woman holding their coffee cup in that same particular way she once held hers. Elsewhere, I overhear a slight lisping of words, distracted by memories of a deep intonation and sporadic articulation on the hard t-sounds - “this isth the worsT Time of our livesth…”
I don’t know these people, nor do I want to know these people, but for three seconds at a time these strangers allow me to remove myself from my present existence and I’m taken to a spot five years or five months ago, or to a spot one year into the future…to a time when I’m with a person I once cared about, a person I currently care about, or someone with whom my emotions have yet to fully articulate themselves.
Three seconds is all it takes. A blink in the entire expanse of time. But, standing there, everything that happens in my head turns into three months…three years…three decades. There I am, standing in the middle of wherever - the sounds of cars and passerby enveloping my thoughts and my feelings, my mind concentrated on missing the people I’ve liked, the people I’ve loved, and the people I barely know.
I’m not very good at missing people. Or, maybe, I’m just not very good at telling people that I miss them. Probably both.
To say “I miss you” is a hard thing: it’s an admission of emotions towards another person that signifies them as a part of your existence…a marker designated for someone that has left an imprint on your experience of this life.
An “I miss you” brings back the memories of shared experiences deeply buried as well as the possibilities of what could have been or could be. To complicate things, an “I miss you” can easily be misconstrued as a romantic desire or longing for someone (when that isn’t the case); worse, I think, is that sometimes those words are merely a thinly-veiled attempt at expressing precisely that desire - a want for affection that needs satiating.
“I miss you”: concise in meaning and seemingly effortless in saying. Eight letters that can be shortened to seven (“miss you), six (“I miss u”), and even further to five (“miss u”); yet, often, that’s still five to eight letters too many.
And I also adamantly believe that you’ll miss people more than they’ll miss you. This applies to everyone, regardless of whether the reality can actually prove otherwise.
That is to say: there may be cases where another person misses you to a similar or greater extent, but the point becomes moot. Because you have no true knowledge of this, and there’s no comparison tool that compares the weight between the two different I miss yous. In the end, the validity of the weight of your perceived loss/longing is the only thing that can be felt; your subjective emotive weight for the other person is the only thing that lingers…it’s the only thing that counts. So, you’re left feeling…un-whole.
Reading all of this shouldn’t be surprising: 1.) I’m an over-thinker and 2.) I’m not very good at expressing my emotions. I’ll never/rarely share how I feel about a friend or someone I’m developing feelings for.
Vulnerability scares me, and the outright facing of my emotions for another person is the bedrock of human vulnerability.
Whenever a friend expresses an “I love you”, I’m left emotionally paralyzed. I stand there laughing it off (or writing back some variation of “lol” or “hahha”), too afraid to write or say it back despite the mutual feelings. Why say “I love you” back when I can just completely pretend you didn’t say it, am I right? “I appreciate you” becomes the standard fallback - you matter to me, but the extent to which is ambiguous…a recognition of your significance in my life that doesn’t leave me emotionally-unclothed.
I write all of this because this notion of longing and of these nuances of love (platonic or otherwise) have preoccupied my isolation time in the COVID era. The life I had in March, and all those relationships and intimacies - established and nascent - were suddenly interrupted; the what-ifs suddenly at risk of transforming into the whatevers of the past.
And, yet, I’ve seen (tiny) shifts in the way my emotions are expressed or processed. An “I love you” is met with less personal derision and “miss u” has become a little more commonplace. (A full “I miss you” has probably been written/uttered only once or twice - the full statement somehow innately reserved for deeply-rooted emotions, acknowledged or yet-realized). My connections with people have, somehow, strengthened - a seeming underlying ethos that’s driven us all to share in the experiences of those once lost to us, those already in our lives, and those who are just entering. The utterance of I miss yous an attempt at keeping our collective reality intact.
Or maybe I’ve just felt more lonely generally. Who knows? (I welcome your thoughts on all this).
Looking out towards the ocean line, I grab at the now-wet sand in front of me. What once was individual grains coming apart easily becomes a tightly-interwoven structure malleable to the movements of my hands. It feels a little nicer this way.