Wake Me Up When September Ends.

I miss him in a way that settles into the bones. It is not a passing ache or a fleeting thought that comes and goes with the weather. It is the kind of missing that lives in the quiet hours, in the space between one day and the next, in the moment just after I close my eyes and just before I open them again. I wish more people understood how much it hurts every time I have to kiss him goodbye. Those goodbyes are never casual. They are small ruptures. Each one feels like tearing something tender that has only just begun to knit itself back together. The kiss is soft, familiar, full of everything we cannot say out loud in the time we have, and then it is over, and I am left in the aftermath of it, carrying the weight of the next stretch of distance.

For many years I lived with an extremely lonely and broken heart. That is not poetry. It is simply what it was. I was miserable in a deep, unshowy way that does not photograph well and does not invite easy comfort. The kind of misery that makes ordinary mornings feel like work. Everyone abandoned me when I got sick. I do not say that for drama. I say it because it happened. People I thought were permanent grew distant, then silent, then gone. Some left because they did not know what to do with illness. Some left because my world became smaller and less convenient. Some left because I changed.

Yes, I formed my own opinions. I stopped performing the version of myself that made other people comfortable. I became sharper in places, quieter in others, less willing to pretend that everything was fine when it was not. That may have alienated people. I accept that now with less bitterness than I used to. At the time I did not have the purpose or the desire to heal and get better. Healing requires a reason to stay in the fight, and I did not have one. Everything seemed worthless. The future felt like a hallway with no doors. Effort felt pointless. Getting out of bed felt like an argument I kept losing.

Until now.

It has been nearly four years since my man and I physically met. Three years before that were full of screens and voices and the strange intimacy of people who know each other’s silences before ever even touching. That number still surprises me when I say it out loud. We have not had the ordinary accumulation of shared rooms, shared meals, shared weather. What we have had instead is his constant support and his steady encouragement. He did not arrive with grand speeches or easy fixes. He stayed. He listened when I had nothing graceful to offer. He reminded me, again and again, that I was not as finished as I believed I was.

That kind of presence does not transform a life overnight. It works incrementally. A little more willingness to try. A little more belief that effort might not be wasted. A slightly firmer sense that my status in life is not fixed in the place where illness and loneliness left it. I am not writing this from a mountaintop. I am writing it from the middle of the climb, still missing him, still feeling the sting of every goodbye, still carrying the old loneliness in certain rooms of myself. But I am no longer living as if everything is worthless. That shift matters more than I once thought it would.

I miss him. I will keep missing him until the next time we can close the distance, however briefly. And when that time comes, I will kiss him knowing exactly what it costs to let go afterward. I will do it anyway. Some things are worth the ache.