Nowhere to Land

You wake from an odd dream, the kind you would have told someone about over the first coffee of the morning. You turn the words over, ready to hand them across. Then you remember there is no one on the other end of them. The dream just sits there, untold.

This is grief, even if it does not look like the grief other people recognize. The one who used to hear about your days is gone. And it turns out that so much of a day was made of small reports you carried to a single listener.

The odd dream. The small victory at work that no one else would count as a victory. The slow burn of being cut off in traffic, too minor to phone anyone about but exactly the size you used to share. All of these have nowhere to land now. They float up the way they always did, looking for the place they used to go, and the place is not there.

What surprises people is how this hollows out the events themselves. A thing happens and feels half real, because the telling was part of how it became real. You used to live a moment once and then again in the saying of it, and the second time was where it counted. Without the listener, the day stays unfinished. It happened, technically. It just never quite arrived.

The strangest part is catching yourself mid-reach. You are partway through composing the update before you know you are doing it, already shaping the small story for the one who liked the small stories. The sentence is half built when the floor drops out of it. There is no one to send it to. You finish the thought anyway, into the quiet, because the habit is older than the absence.

That reflex is not foolish. It is what being heard does to a person. When someone has received your days for long enough, the reaching does not stop the morning they go. Your mind keeps addressing letters to a place that no longer takes mail.

If the unsent stories keep piling up, and the days feel more and more unreal for having no one to land in, letting one real person receive some of them can help. Saying it aloud to someone sitting across from you gives a few of those stranded moments somewhere to go. If naming the loss feels too odd to put into words, that difficulty is common, and the right listener works with it.

For now the small things keep arriving the way they always did. You will keep half composing them out of long love. Let them land where they can.

The stories still come. You are learning to carry the ones that have nowhere to go.