Talking to No-One

Wrote this tiny little essay in my Sophomore year Philosophy Course. Enjoy, or hate it.

We like to say we love people. Bodies. Names. Faces. But if we’re honest—brutally honest—those are just the containers. What we love is never the carbon itself. We love what happens inside and beside it. The way time behaves when someone is near. The feeling of being known and knowing (trust). The brief and absolute suspension of loneliness when that other consciousness overlaps our own.

Nobody aches for bone and tissue.
We ache for moments.

When someone leaves our life, we don’t miss their skin or their weight or even the details of their fingerprints. We miss the feeling of their skin, their weight. The sound of their laugh in a moment—or a thousand moments all at once. That’s what hurts most: not the loss of a person, but the loss of access to a version of ourselves we only became in their presence.

Humans treat love as property—as if someone can be owned emotionally the same way a old chair or a house can be owned physically. But intimacy isn’t a possession. It’s an event. And events end. The tragedy isn’t that people die or leave. The tragedy is that moments never remain still long enough for us to notice we’re inside them until they’re already past.

When we meet someone, they always ask where you’re from or where you’re going.
No one ever asks, “Who are you right now?”

Memory is the real wound. Not abandonment. Not distance. Memory is proof that something happened once that no longer exists. Every ache is simply time reminding us that it only moves forward—and in the spirit of Anna Nalick, “the hourglass is still glued to the table.”

We often say heartbreak is about someone else—but it isn’t. It’s about ourselves. It’s grief over losing who we were while someone was around. That version of us becomes unreachable without them. Not dead—just sealed off in time, like an old room we no longer enter.

People confuse longing for a return of themselves with wanting another person. What they really want is the weather of those years. The emotional climate. The familiar gravity. The internal rhythm that existed then, but is unreachable now. No one wants their ex back. They want their nervous system back. They want what once felt like simple mathematics.

We believe love must be eternal because we cannot tolerate how temporary it actually is. But fleetingness is not a flaw. It’s the entire meaning. If moments were permanent, there would be nothing sacred about them. The reason a touch matters is because it ends. The reason a voice cuts through us is because one day it will never reach us again.

Everything worthwhile decays. That doesn’t invalidate it.
It proves it was real.

We don’t mourn people.
We mourn time that will never happen again in the same way.

And calling that “love” is the most honest and comforting lie humanity ever invented—
because the truth would be too clean, too cold, and too piercing to survive.