”

The saddest part is I will never meet someone just like him every again,” she said, and her emotion overflows into my once hollowed out feelings. “The way he forgets things, his directness- things I used to hate, now I miss.”  “Damn,” I reply, overwhelmed with a feeling of great loss. Suddenly, I think about everyone that I meet, and their quirks. Their uniqueness. About the uniqueness of any two people’s relationship and interaction. I think about my oddities and silliness, and wonder if you ever miss them. Then I think about you, and how I will never meet anyone else as socially awkward yet caring, as intellectual yet risk-taking, as open yet closed. Suddenly, I miss the long gones. The ones you think about now not in anger anymore, but in fondness. The ones that shaped your view of love and yourself. “You don’t have to be friends with someone to love them,” another friend of mine states, as if reading my mind. And I think about love, how freely some people give it away, while others hold tight as if it were a limited supply. I think about the way we love the long gones. The ones that we are “over.” How the long gones sometimes hit us like a tornado, out of the blue. How we compare every next person to them, requiring a basic set of traits that they had or lacked. And time, how it winds and molds and mends, but is not linear. How we backtrack and come full circle. How at the end of the day, the long gones are here inside of us, and will never really go away.