#5 Summer of Grief — Longing for Something
Today was a good day. Not in the way people usually describe a good day — there were no beaches, no festivals, no golden-hour drinks on crowded terraces. It was quiet. I stayed home and read, and I wrote. For hours. I barely looked up.
Meanwhile, some of my friends were out. People I follow on Instagram posted videos from the seaside, from sweaty dance floors, from places full of light and noise and movement. I saw it all in passing, and for a moment I felt the familiar tug — that sense of being absent from something you’re supposed to be part of. But I didn’t move. I couldn’t. The urge to write was stronger. It wasn’t even a choice. It just felt necessary.
Still, even when you’re doing something that feels entirely right, there can be a kind of grief. A small, internal protest. The version of you that wanted to be elsewhere — wanted to be part of whatever was happening outside — doesn't disappear just because you’re being productive. That part still aches. There’s no dramatic sadness to it. Just a quiet awareness that you’re missing something.
It becomes a kind of split: being here, and imagining there. Trying to choose presence, while negotiating the loss of what presence costs. It’s not profound. It’s just human.
Some people are dancing. Some are crying. Some are recovering from heartbreak or hiding from it. Some are escaping the heat by staying in bed. Some go out to feel more. Others to feel less. We all try to end up where we need to be, even if we’re not always sure what that means. No one else can decide it for you. That’s the hardest and most freeing part of it.
So I stayed. I wrote. And in the end, it felt amazing. Not in a euphoric way, but in a quiet, solid way. Like something inside me aligned. Maybe it was hormonal — I’ve learned to trust that too. Or maybe it was just one of those rare days where the inside world feels clearer than the outside one, and that clarity is enough.
Even when my boyfriend and I tried to go to the cinema, and the rain came down harder than expected, and the bus never showed up, and we missed the film, we just turned around and walked back home. I ended up writing again. Somehow, it made the day feel even more precise. Sometimes you just have to admit that things unfold the way they’re meant to.
All we had left in the house was a bit of bourbon whiskey. So we poured some into mismatched glasses. Maybe we were romanticising it — staying in while the rain kept falling, not knowing what film to put on, not doing anything in particular. Laughing because the bourbon was too strong to sip without wincing.
It felt like something rare. Something quiet and intimate. We grieve for the choices we didn’t make, because they seem better in hindsight. But we didn’t make them for a reason. And maybe that reason is enough.
In the end, all there was left to do was tumble into each other — and to write (this piece). That quiet surrender to the moment. Not the one we planned, but the one we got.
