Fragments of Cassandra

There are things I don’t know how to say without feeling foolish.

How much I admire you, for one.

The way you move through the world with a kindness that makes people soften. The way your laugh can turn an ordinary moment into something worth remembering. The way your presence has become woven into the fabric of my days so thoroughly that your absence echoes through them when you’re gone.

I miss you.
Not just in the obvious ways.

I miss the version of myself that exists beside you—the one who feels lighter, more understood, more alive. I miss reaching for a thought and knowing exactly who I wanted to tell first. I miss the comfort of believing that maybe, somewhere in this vast world, I had found my person.

Lately, I don’t feel seen by anyone.

I watch the people around me find each other so effortlessly. They have their person. Their first call. Their safe place to land. They belong somewhere in someone.

And I stand at the edges of it all, smiling and cheering them on, while quietly realizing that I have spent much of my life being the one people leave and return to only when it is convenient.

There is another truth I’ve been afraid to say out loud.
This feeling didn’t begin with you.
You didn’t create it.

You simply placed your hand against a bruise I have carried for as long as I can remember.

Because when I look back across my life, I see the same pattern written everywhere.

In family.
In friendships.
In the people I’ve loved.
I have always been there.

Reliable. Devoted. The one who remembers birthdays and favorite songs. The one who answers the late-night phone calls. The one who shows up, stays too long, gives too much, and loves as if love itself could convince someone to keep choosing me.

And yet, somehow, I am rarely the person they reach for first.

I am not the name that slips naturally from their lips in moments of joy.
I am not the person they call when their world falls apart.
I have begun to accept that I am not anyone’s first choice.

Not anyone’s home.
Not anyone’s go-to.

I am loved, perhaps, but in ways that feel temporary. Replaceable. Like a bookmark tucked into the pages of someone’s story while they search for the chapter they truly want.

I have spent years watching the people around me find their person while wondering, quietly and privately, what it is about me that makes me so easy to set down.

Why I can be cherished and still not chosen.
Why I can be needed and still not become home.

Maybe grief has sharpened my loneliness into certainty.
Or maybe loneliness has simply taught me how to recognize itself.

These days, my body carries sadness before my mind has a chance to name it.

There is a flutter beneath my ribs that never quite settles. A trembling in my chest, as though tears have made a home there and cannot decide whether to stay or finally spill over.

My throat is almost always tight.
A constant lump that rises and falls with every breath.

It feels as though I am forever on the verge of crying—standing at the shoreline of something immense and devastating, with the tide pressing against my lungs but never fully taking me under.

It is almost suffocating.
Exhausting, carrying sorrow that refuses to arrive and refuses to leave.

Sometimes I wonder if this is simply what longing feels like when it has nowhere to go.

And maybe there isn’t an answer.
Maybe this isn’t evidence that I am unworthy, forgettable, or too much.
Maybe I learned to mistake being overlooked for being replaceable.

Maybe I have spent so long trying to earn my place in other people’s lives that I forgot love was never meant for me.

I don’t know.

What I do know is that,
I am tired.

Tired of auditioning for permanence.
Tired of measuring my worth by the seats people save for me at their tables.
Tired of believing that being someone’s person is the only proof that I mattered.

And yet, beneath all of it, there is a strange sort of peace beginning to settle inside me.

Not happiness.
Not resolution.
Just acceptance.

The understanding that not every love story is meant to become a home.
That not every person we choose will choose us back in the same way.
That being deeply loved and being deeply claimed are not always the same thing.

I cannot force myself into someone’s orbit.
I cannot earn permanence through devotion.
I cannot make myself indispensable by loving harder.

And perhaps there is mercy in finally setting down that impossible task.
Because despite everything, my love for you has remained stubborn and soft.

I admire you more than I know what to do with.
I carry you with me in the smallest moments—in songs I think you’d love, in stories I save for later, in jokes I hear and instinctively wish I could tell you.

I still collect them.
Little pieces of my days.

A ridiculous headline that would’ve made you laugh. A passing thought I know you would’ve understood. A song lyric that sounds like something you would’ve sent me at two in the morning with no explanation at all.

And for a fleeting second, I forget.
I reach for my phone before remembering that I am no longer the person you call.

No longer the person who gets to interrupt your day with insignificant things simply because they mattered to me.

So I tuck those moments back inside myself.

I swallow the stories.
I memorize the punchlines.
I let the songs play all the way through with no one to send them to.

And perhaps that is one of the loneliest parts of missing someone:
not the absence of the extraordinary moments,
but the accumulation of ordinary ones.

All the tiny offerings of love that never find a place to land.
I yearn for you.

I miss you deeply, every single day.
But I no longer want to hold that yearning with clenched fists.

I want to hold it gently.
Like one holds a bird that has decided not to stay.

Not trying to cage it.
Not resenting its leaving.

Simply grateful that, for a time, it chose to rest in my hands at all.

Perhaps I was never meant to be someone’s person.
Perhaps I was only meant to love people fiercely and let them continue on their way.
Or perhaps my story isn’t over yet.

Perhaps there is still a table somewhere with my name already written at it.

A place where I do not have to earn my belonging.
A place where I am reached for first.

Where love does not feel borrowed or conditional.
Where staying is not something I have to beg for.

Until then, I will carry both truths together:
that I loved you enough to miss you,
and that I love myself enough to loosen my grip.

Because even if I was not your home, knowing you existed altered the landscape of mine.

You mattered to me.
You still do.

And in a world where I often feel invisible, knowing you existed at all has been one of the few lights I have trusted enough to follow through the dark.

I still ache to know what it feels like to be someone’s certainty.
To be the person they instinctively turn toward.

To stop standing at the edges of everyone else’s belonging and finally hear someone say,

“Come here.
I’ve been looking for you.
There’s a place for you beside me.
And you don’t have to earn it.”

Until then, I will keep loving.

I will keep showing up.

I will keep believing that the way I love is not a weakness, even if it has often left me lonely.

or maybe I will disappear quietly,
into the shadows people left me in. 



Be’ahava,
The Mourning Bird