Letters #1: We used to be so happy

It’s been ten years.

I still don’t know how to say that without it feeling unreal. Ten years sounds like enough time for something to fade, to soften, to become a story instead of a wound.

But it hasn’t.

I miss you in ways that don’t announce themselves. Not loudly. Not dramatically. Just quietly, constantly, like a hum I’ve learned to live with.

Sometimes I forget for a few hours. Sometimes even a whole day. And then it comes back all at once.

And with it, the guilt.

I replay things I can’t change. Conversations that never happened. Moments I wish I had noticed more. Done more. Said more. I don’t even know what “more” means, but my mind keeps searching for it anyway.

It’s strange what grief does to time.

In some ways, everything moved forward. Life kept going. I grew up. People changed. The world changed.

But in other ways, I think part of me is still there, ten years ago, trying to understand something that never made sense.

I’ve started to realize something recently.

What happened back then didn’t just stay back then.

It’s in the way I think. The way I react. The way I hold on to people. The way I’m afraid of losing them.

It shows up in small moments I wouldn’t have connected before. In how I process happiness. In how I brace for things to go wrong, even when they’re going right.

It’s like a quiet imprint on everything.

And maybe that’s the hardest part to accept:

You don’t really “move on.”

You don’t wake up one day and feel healed. You just learn how to carry it.

Some days it’s lighter. Some days it’s not.

But it never really leaves.

I think about how we used to be.

How simple everything felt. How easy it was to be happy without even realizing it.

And I’ve been thinking.

Maybe everyone has a version of that.

A time before something changed them. Before they understood loss. Before life got heavier in ways they couldn’t explain.

We used to be so happy.

Not because everything was perfect, but because we didn’t know what it felt like for things not to be.

I don’t know if that kind of happiness ever comes back the same way.

But I hope, somehow, it comes back in a different form.

Something quieter. Something more aware. Something that carries you with it, instead of trying to replace you.

I still think about you all the time.

And I probably always will.

To A