What I’ve been mourning, I think, is the outline. The suggestion of closeness, not its reality. The ghost of a hand once near mine. I have been grieving architectures built from glances, kindnesses, half-spoken sentences, structures so fragile, they collapsed the moment I tried to name them.

They said he died on a road somewhere outside the city , beneath the kind of sky no one remembers. I heard it by accident—his name dropped carelessly in someone else’s sentence, like a coin lost between cushions. I didn’t ask for more. Grief, when it finally came, arrived not as thunder, but as a slow, un-lit echo.

He wasn’t mine to mourn, not by any of the rules that make mourning legible. He was older. A student of my mother’s. He came and went like the rain—appearing in the humid weeks of our school holidays with a racket slung over his shoulder and the scent of summer and whatever trendy deodrant on his skin. He taught me how to stand, how to serve, how to wait. His instructions were quiet, almost offhand, but I followed them like prayer. Once, he brought me chocolate wrapped in red foil, and said nothing of it. That was the kind of boy he was: offering small kindnesses like a spy talking in a code– only he and I knew. I think I began to believe, in the way children do, that he would always return. Some people feel eternal simply because they were kind to you before you learned the weight of kindness.

What unsettles me is not the depth of my sorrow, but its disproportionality. The grief did not arrive for someone with whom I shared a language of confidences or a history of narrative closeness. It arrived for someone who once handed me a racket with multiple instructions, who stood just behind me in a courtyard of early summer mornings, correcting the curve of my fingers. His presence was brief, his touch peripheral—and yet the ache, when it arrived, was neither small nor containable. It was, to borrow from Paul Kalanithi, a grief not of what was lost, but of what was never fully grasped to begin with.

Kalanithi writes, “Even if I’m dying, until I actually die, I am still living.” He understood the brutal tenderness of human relationships—the impossibility of ever fully comprehending another’s interiority, even as we try. In his meditations on mortality, he gestures to the fragmentary nature of knowledge between people. We exist to one another in pieces: gestures, glances, tonalities. Death does not erase a whole—it interrupts an unfolding. My memories of him are spectral, stitched together not by narrative but by association. The sound of plastic shuttlecocks on concrete. The hush of dusk after a match. The wrappers of cheap chocolate in the shape of gifts. I remember the deliberate way he moved, the patience in his corrections, the brief but specific care he extended to a girl who watched him with unspoken reverence. He never said much, and I asked even less. And yet, he inhabits my recollection like an unfinished sentence—hovering between gesture and myth.

This is the nature of partial grief: to mourn not a person in their entirety, but the silhouette they left behind. Not the intimacy of our shared truths, but the silent thrum of their routine presence. He was not a protagonist in my life, nor was I in his. But we crossed paths in the liminal corridors of ordinary kindness, and when he left unannounced, something foundational—though still nameless shook loose within me. 

There are distances that grow not from absence, but from language unspoken. When she and I stopped calling, it wasn’t because we ran out of affection—it was because we no longer had the grammar for it. The slow erosion of a friendship is not always caused by rupture. Sometimes it is a semantic drift: shared words losing their meaning, old symbols no longer translating across time. We had grown fluent in different dialects of becoming. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o writes, “Language, any language, has a dual character: it is both a means of communication and a carrier of culture.” When fluency falters, it is not just expression that suffers—it is worldview, moral architecture, ways of loving, ways of leaving. Her jokes became opaque. My metaphors landed flat. Between us, silence grew—not as hostility, but as incompatibility of narrative maps.

With him—the man I once loved—I spoke incessantly. But even in our verbosity, there was misalignment. Lera Boroditsky observes that language does not merely describe reality; it constructs perception. I spoke in longing. He replied in detachment. What I named intimacy, he heard as noise. What he offered as neutrality, I read as indifference. We were fluent in different affective ontologies. We mistook proximity for understanding. In our aftermath, I found myself wondering about the things unsaid: Did she grieve our fading? Did he ever rehearse, in silence, the things he didn’t say to me? It is sonder, as conceptual tenderness—the silent recognition that every person contains entire interior landscapes I was never granted access to. I could not translate them, only intuit their presence. And in this failure of our fluency, our intimacy dissolves into myth: I carry not the people, but the shadows of their unsaid sentences.

In the wake of his departure, I discovered that my mourning was not for us but for the closeness I never came to possess. His goodbye was a silence punctuated by presence—a void where his steady regard might have been. I grieved the contours of possibility, the tenderness unspoken, and the warmth I rehearsed in my dreams but never touched in my waking life. I found both lament and invitation—a recognition that loss need not be final, that memory can be remade with gentle resolve. His name became an echo I coaxed into shape, recasting every farewell as the prologue to an imagined conversation.

Sonder, then, became my compass back to him: My final act of love – deliberate act of my imagination through which I built the interior landscape that he once inhabited. I forgave myself for the blind spots, for the questions I never asked, and for the silences I mistook for understanding. In honoring the space between us, I learned to mourn not only his absence but also the distance I never managed to bridge.

Grief, I’ve come to understand, is not always retrospective. Grief, in this form, is a choreography of speculation. It pirouettes between memory and myth, between what was offered and what I believed was meant. In the vacuum they left behind, I filled in the silences with narrative, with softness, with longing shaped like evidence. I mourned the shape of a gaze, the tempo of a laugh, and the promise threaded through an unfinished sentence.

I revisit them not to remember, but to reconstruct. To grant their silence a shape. To salvage meaning from the margins they left behind. Grief, I’ve come to learn, is not always loud or justified. Sometimes, it’s simply the ghost of an almost. A tenderness rehearsed and never returned. A gesture passed between strangers that lingers like perfume on an empty sleeve.

Did he carry the aftertaste of me, too—in dreams, in traffic lights, in rooms that smelled like the middle of our story?

Did the trace I left—light as breath—ever tremble in the hollows he taught himself not to feel?

Did he name me in any language but forgetting? Or was I always only a mispronunciation in his mouth—tasted but unswallowed, held but unnamed, vanishing mid-syllable?

And if I was never truly known, then what exactly, have I been mourning all this time?

THIS IS WHAT I MEAN