There should really be a punch card for grief by now. Ten losses and you get a free latte, a brief reprieve, a coupon for “emotional stability, one day only.” I would have redeemed mine several lifetimes ago.

I have lost in all the traditional ways. The kinds people nod solemnly at. A mother. A mentor. A friend. A spouse. A dream that once felt so real it had a heartbeat. An ideal I wrapped myself in like a favorite coat, only to realize it had holes I couldn’t see until the wind came through.

But these new losses,  they are slipperier. Harder to explain at dinner parties. Not quite socially sanctioned enough to earn casseroles or sympathy cards.

One was never mine. Not really. It was, apparently, on loan like a library book I didn’t realize had a due date stamped in invisible ink. And yet I loved it. Fully. Recklessly. As if ownership could be willed into existence by devotion alone. Now I am being asked to return it, gently, quietly, like it didn’t become part of my nervous system. Like I didn’t rearrange emotional furniture to make space for it. There is something that feels almost disloyal in letting it go without protest. As if the depth of my grief is the only evidence that it mattered.

The other loss is crueler in a different way. It is the loss of something I believed was mine but never was. Not borrowed. Not shared. Just imagined into solidity. A structure I leaned on that turns out to have been made of balsa wood and good intentions. It breaks, and I don’t just fall  I question my own eyesight. How did I not see the cracks? Or worse. Were there cracks, or was I gently, persistently told there weren’t?

That’s the part that lingers. The quiet echo of was I foolish, or was I fooled? The subtle disorientation of realizing that what felt like safety was, at best, a temporary stage set. Beautiful from the audience. Hollow up close.

And here’s the inconvenient truth and the one I would very much like to return for a refund. Grief doesn’t care about technicalities. It doesn’t care if something was “yours” in the legal, official, universally agreed-upon sense. If you loved it, if you invested in it, if it changed you then the loss is real. Full stop.

So I sit here, again, with grief. An old, uninvited companion who knows the layout of my soul better than I do. It doesn’t knock anymore. It just lets itself in, takes off its coat, and says, “We’ve done this before.”

And we have.

But it never feels routine. It never feels manageable in the way people promise it eventually will. It feels like betrayal and tenderness holding hands. Like love continuing past its expiration date. Like learning, again and again, that not everything we are given is ours to keep and not everything we believe is stable actually is.

I had meant to write a poem. But this isn’t a poem. Poems feel too neat for this kind of unraveling.

This is something else.

A quiet reckoning with the masks we trusted, the safety nets that weren’t, the love that was real even if its container wasn’t. A reminder that my capacity to love which was misplaced, misjudged, or temporarily housed is not the failure here.

If anything, it’s the only thing that remains intact.

And so I grieve. Not just what was lost, but what I thought I had. Not just the ending, but the illusion that there was something permanent to begin with.

And still, annoyingly, stubbornly, almost offensively, I know this.

I will love again.

Not because I am naive.

But because, despite all evidence to the contrary, I am still willing to believe something might be real.