If you’ve read my last piece, then you’d know I’ve survived what felt like an unsurvivable time in my life. I lost three of the people I loved most in less than a year. And what’s more devastating is that their deaths didn’t take me with them. Instead, they made it so I had to stay.

They made dying no longer an option. Guilt is a terrible reason to stay alive. But I guess what works, works.

Now that time has passed, I’ve learned that it’s impossible to always accept fate. However, we can at least stop arguing with it. My relationship with my father has improved considerably. Nonetheless, we still don’t understand each other, not really. Perhaps we never will. But I suppose understanding is not always a prerequisite for coexistence. I still need a roof when I go back home, after all. So I’ve learned to make peace with whatever this is.

But this is not what I want to write about today.

I think (and I seriously hope) I’ve grieved enough. I wasn’t even allowed to breathe back then. It happened so fast, and I needed to get back on track, or I’d shatter my future with bad results. It was a dramatic ending, the way Mom left. It was disgustingly hasty.

And yet, despite everything people say about those who take their own lives, I choose not to believe it. They said Mom would face eternal damnation, but I just can’t fathom that. I have to believe she is somewhere gentler. She has had enough. I really like to believe she is in a much happier place, like my sister.

I have grieved them enough. Long enough to know that grief, in its loudest form, does not last forever. Grief used to carry me, and we’ve swapped places. Now I’m the one carrying it. I can choose when to grieve, in quiet places, and I continue my days with a smile.

But there is another kind of grief I am only beginning to understand: the grief of outgrowing people who are still alive.

Again, like before, I was totally unprepared. And I was rendered hopeless when things like this happened. Unlike death, there are no funerals to mark the ending. And I was unable to find closure. It was just a slow, almost imperceptible distance that stretched between me and this noteworthy someone. And it becomes worse because this someone was also a home to me. I lost home twice.

It sounds weird, and even to me, impossible. But this one hurts more than last time, since I can still see her around. I can still even hear her laugh in the very class we’re in. But we don’t talk anymore. As much as I hate confrontation, I wish nothing more than for her to talk to me. I wish that she had told me if I made any mistakes. She, out of everyone, was the one I had hoped would understand my place after such a devastating end.

It doesn’t happen all at once. There is no singular moment you can point to and say, this is where it ended. That’s why I was weirded out. I thought it was just a small misunderstanding, that we had simply grown apart. For a while, I thought you just needed time, though I’d say the same about me. Instead, it broke gradually. We did have conversations, but you laughed no more at my jokes. It was like you preferred silence to my noise. And that hurts me. I began to notice how much effort it took to maintain something that once felt effortless. It used to be so easy, talking to you.

And I resent myself for that. Despite not knowing what fault I am at, or if it’s my fault at all to begin with, I’d like to think that maybe I could have fixed it. But it would be nice if you had tried the same way I did. That you had been braver, to face this together with me, like we always did. Didn’t we used to be the best of company? Weren’t you the one who promised to stay to the very end? This is, for sure, not the very end I was hoping for. I’ve been stronger now, after the devastation I felt. And I don’t want this to end, whatever we have.

How do I explain that the person sitting across from me is no longer the person I knew, even though they look exactly the same? I think that’s what makes this kind of grief so unbearable. I feel guilty for feeling it at all. Because compared to losing someone forever, what right do I have to mourn someone who is still here?

Sometimes, losing the version of someone you once loved hurts just as much as losing the person themselves. Like I miss Dad. I just miss his past self. I had hoped that nothing had changed. Maybe I’d have been one happy girl.

Now, I have stopped trying to revive something that has already, in its own quiet way, ended. And in doing so, I grieve. Again.