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There are some pieces of news that your mind understands before your heart is ready to accept them, and finding out that you have passed away was one of those moments for me.

I wasn’t expecting anything when I opened social media and saw your face. At first, it was just another picture, something familiar enough to make me stop scrolling for a second, but then I noticed the words underneath it. People were saying goodbye, sharing memories, writing about how much they loved you, and using words like “rest in peace” that didn’t seem like they belonged anywhere near your name. I kept scrolling because part of me was convinced I had misunderstood something, but every post only made the truth harder to avoid.

You are really gone.

It has been four years since our relationship ended, and in those four years, life continued in completely different directions for both of us. We stopped being part of each other’s everyday lives, eventually became people who probably knew very little about what the other was doing, and moved forward into chapters that no longer included one another. I found love again, built a different life, and made peace with the fact that what we shared belonged to another time.

Even so, I never imagined that hearing about your death would bring so many memories rushing back at once.

I keep remembering the things about you that made you you, especially the little things that felt so ordinary when we were living them. I remember how much you loved your music and how certain songs could completely change your mood. Music seemed to follow us through so many parts of our relationship, and now I can’t help thinking about the songs you loved and wondering which ones would immediately make the people closest to you think of you.

I remember your smile, and I remember your laugh even more. There are some laughs you don’t realize you’ve memorized until enough time passes and suddenly you can almost hear them again in your head. I remember the way you could make a joke out of something completely ridiculous, the stupid things that probably wouldn’t have been funny to anyone else, and the moments where one of us would say something so dumb that we couldn’t stop laughing.

Those are the memories that hurt in such a strange way not because they’re also the ones that make me smile.

I remember the concerts we went to together and how exciting those nights felt. The crowds, the music being so loud that you could feel it in your chest, singing along, looking over at each other in the middle of songs, and just being young enough to believe there would always be another concert, another night out, another memory waiting somewhere ahead of us. At the time, those moments were simply part of our relationship. I never thought there would come a day when I would look back on them and realize how precious it is that I got to share them with someone who isn’t here anymore.

And then there were the FaceTime calls.

Before we moved in together, there were nights when we would spend hours on FaceTime, sometimes talking about everything and sometimes talking about absolutely nothing. We would stay on the phone longer than either of us probably planned to, talking about our days, making jokes, telling stories, getting tired but still not wanting to hang up yet. Sometimes it wasn’t even about having anything important left to say; it was simply about wanting the other person there.

Those memories feel especially tender now because I can remember what it felt like when hearing your voice at the end of the day was something normal.

Eventually, those FaceTime calls turned into sharing the same space because we moved in together, and suddenly the person I had spent hours talking to through a screen was someone I was building an everyday life around. Like any relationship, ours wasn’t perfect. There were good days, difficult days, things that made us laugh, things that hurt, and eventually reasons why our lives needed to go in separate directions.

I don’t feel the need to rewrite any of that now that you’re gone.

Our relationship didn’t have to be perfect for the good memories to still matter.

I think death has a strange way of reminding you that a person is more than the ending you had with them. When a relationship ends, it’s easy to let the breakup become the final definition of everything that happened before it, but hearing that you died reminded me of the person you were before we became two separate people who needed to go separate ways.

You were the person who loved his music.

You were the person whose laugh I can still remember.

You were the person who made stupid jokes that somehow made me laugh harder than they probably deserved.

You were the person standing beside me at concerts while music filled the room around us.

You were the person on the other side of my phone during those long FaceTime nights when neither of us seemed ready to say goodnight.

And for a period of my life, you were home.

Four years have passed since that version of life ended, and I genuinely thought I had already said the only goodbye I would ever need to say to you. I accepted that our paths had separated and that somewhere in the world you were continuing your story while I continued mine.

I never needed to know what you were doing.

I didn’t need updates about your life or to know where you ended up. I didn’t need another conversation, another chance, or another chapter together. I was okay knowing that somewhere out there, you had a life that no longer had anything to do with me.

I just assumed that life would keep going.

Maybe that’s what has made hearing about your passing so difficult to process. I never consciously thought about the fact that you were somewhere living your ordinary days because I didn’t have a reason to. You simply existed somewhere in the world, and apparently there was more comfort in that than I ever realized.

I thought you would keep having birthdays. I thought there would be more songs you would discover and immediately love, more concerts you would go to, more terrible jokes you would tell, and more moment where that smile and laugh filled a room. I thought years would continue passing until eventually we were much older and the relationship we had became something that happened ten, twenty, or thirty years ago.

I never needed to be there for any of it.

I just wanted you to have it.

I’m in a relationship now, and initially that made all of these emotions difficult for me to understand because I wondered whether I even had the right to feel this sad and heartbroken. I worried that grieving someone from my past could somehow be misunderstood as longing for the relationship we had, but the more I sit with this, the more I understand that those things are not the same.

I don’t want our relationship back.

I don’t want to go backward or change the life I’ve built now.

I can love the person I’m with today while still feeling sadness that someone I loved four years ago is no longer alive. My present doesn’t erase my past, and acknowledging that you mattered doesn’t take anything away from the person I’m with now.

Sometimes grief isn’t about wanting someone back.

Sometimes it’s simply about realizing that someone who once filled so much space in your life no longer exists anywhere except in memories.

And I have memories.

I have the music.

I have your smile.

I have the sound of your laugh somewhere in the back of my mind.

I have the jokes that probably weren’t nearly as funny as we thought they were.

I have memories of concerts where the world outside didn’t matter for a few hours because we were surrounded by music.

I have memories of staring at a FaceTime screen late at night, talking for hours before either of us wanted to finally say goodnight.

I have memories of the life that came afterward, when we moved in together and those late-night calls turned into being able to look across the room and actually see you there.

Those things happened.

Whatever came later doesn’t erase them.

And now that you’re gone, I think I’m grateful that I can remember you in those moments instead of only remembering how our story ended.

If I could talk to you one more time, I don’t think I would ask questions about what happened between us or try to fix anything from four years ago. I wouldn’t use that conversation to talk about regrets, explain myself, or reopen doors that life had already closed.

I think I would just sit with you for a little while and remember.

I’d probably bring up one of the concerts we went to and ask if you remembered some stupid little thing that happened that night. I’d remind you of one of your jokes and probably tell you that it still wasn’t as funny as you thought it was. I’d tell you that somehow, after all these years, I can still remember your smile and the sound of your laugh.

I’d remind you about those FaceTime nights, when hours somehow disappeared while we talked, and how there were nights when saying goodnight felt harder than it should have because neither of us wanted to be the one to hang up first.

And then I think I would tell you thank you.

Thank you for those memories.

Thank you for the concerts and the music.

Thank you for the nights when a FaceTime call lasted hours because being connected to each other felt better than going to sleep.

Thank you for making me laugh.

Thank you for the version of you that existed in that chapter of my life, and thank you for the version of myself I got to know while you were part of it.

We weren’t meant to stay together forever, and I’m okay with that. Life moved us in different directions for reasons that belonged to us, and four years ago gave both of us time to become people who existed outside of that relationship.

I just wish you had gotten more time to keep becoming whoever you were meant to be and wanted to be.

I wish you had gotten more music.

I wish you had gotten more concerts where you lost yourself in songs you loved.

I wish there were more people who got to hear that laugh in person.

I wish you had more opportunities to make people roll their eyes at your jokes.

I wish you had more ordinary nights, more mornings, more birthdays, and more years than the ones you were given.

And most of all, I wish the people who love you now weren’t having to figure out how to live without you.

So wherever you are, I hope you’re somewhere peaceful. I hope there’s music there, and I hope somehow it’s every song you ever loved playing exactly as loudly as you wanted it.

I hope you’re smiling.

I hope you’re laughing.

And if there is any way the people we’ve lost can still know what happens in the hearts of the people they leave behind, I hope you know that someone from four years ago remembered more than she thought she did when she heard that you were gone.

I remembered your music.

I remembered your smile and laugh.

I remembered your jokes.

I remembered the concerts.

I remembered those ridiculously long calls before we moved in together, when neither of us seemed to understand the concept of simply hanging up and going to sleep.

And for a moment, I remembered us exactly as we were then – young, imperfect, laughing, and completely unaware of how quickly life could change.

I’m glad those memories still exist.

I’m glad there of pieces of you in my past that make me smile even while saying goodbye makes me cry.

Four years ago, we let each other go because our relationship had reached its ending, and eventually I learned how to accept that.

This goodbye is different.

This time, I’m not saying goodbye to a relationship or to an idea of what we could have been. I’m saying goodbye to the person behind all of those memories.

So thank you for once being someone I could spend hours talking to.

Thank you for the music we listened to and the concerts we experienced together.

Thank you for the laughter, even the jokes I probably pretended weren’t funny.

Thank you for the moments I didn’t realized I would one day be so grateful to still have.

I hope you knew that your life mattered, not just the people beside you at the end, but also to people whose paths crossed yours years ago and continued carrying small pieces of those moments long after life moved on.

I don’t wish we had another chance at the relationship.

I just wish you had another chance at life.

Another concert.

Another favorite song.

Another joke.

Another reason to smile.

Another night laughing with people who loved you.

Another year to become someone new.

I wish you had gotten all of it.

But since I can’t change the fact that you didn’t, I’ll hold onto the pieces of you that I remember with kindness, and I’ll be thankful that for one chapter of my life, I got to know that smile, hear that laugh, listen to your jokes, stand beside you at concerts, and spend far too many late nights talking to you through a screen before we eventually shared the same home.

That chapter ended four years ago, but I never expected your entire story to end this soon.

I hope wherever you are, the music is good.

And I hope you’re still smiling.

Rest peacefully, my love.

—Between the Words