Why am I thinking about my ex so much all of a sudden?
They lit a candle shaped like the number one. One month together. They blew it out at the same time and laughed. Eight days later, she was alone in her apartment, trying to remember what his laugh sounded like. Not gone. Just quiet. The kind of quiet that makes you check your phone even though you know nothing’s there.
We celebrate beginnings like they’re guarantees. We put candles on them. We take pictures. We narrate the moment as if naming it will make it last. And then the air changes and we’re standing in the same room with someone who used to feel like home, wondering when the door closed.
There’s a specific cruelty to short relationships ending. Not enough time to build resentment. Not enough damage to justify the loss. Just a month. Just eight days past a month. People will say it wasn’t real yet. People will say you barely knew him.
But you did know him. You knew the way he tilted his head when he was listening. You knew the smell of his apartment. You knew what it felt like to blow out a candle together and believe in something that hadn’t happened yet.
The grief isn’t smaller because the timeline was. It’s just lonelier. There’s no shared history to point to. No one else who remembers the candle.
What do you do with the weight of something that was real but too brief to be witnessed?
Maybe the month mattered more than we admit. Maybe we don’t need years to feel the shape of a loss. We light candles for beginnings because we want proof that something started. We want to mark the threshold. And when it ends before we expect it to, we’re left holding the lighter, trying to figure out what we were celebrating.
The hardest part isn’t always the ending. It’s the feeling that you weren’t allowed to be sad about it. That the timeline disqualified the grief. That you should already be over something that only lasted thirty-eight days.
But grief doesn’t measure in months. It measures in the distance between what you thought was starting and where you’re standing now.
Sit with these:
What’s a beginning you celebrated that didn’t last? Not because it was bad. Just because it didn’t.
When have you felt too foolish to grieve something small?
What if the length of time doesn’t determine whether something was real?