44: You can grieve the things you never had

At midnight on the 19th of February, I dig a grave, lower the casket, and cover it with earth–but there is no body.

Photograph by YA Visuals

Here’s what’s hard: you can grieve the things you never had. You can cry for the job that was never yours in practice but was yours in desire. You wanted it so badly your mind started treating it like something you already owned. You studied the company, read up on their values, imagined what it would be like to work with their team. You stalked the junior designer on LinkedIn, then Instagram, smiled at the way he paired cute Nike sneakers with an otherwise boring outfit. You had already placed yourself in that office, visualised yourself in their meetings, pictured the casual Slack messages and inside jokes you’d share with your colleagues. And then, after four rounds of interviews, they send the email—We’ve decided to go with someone else.

And that’s the thing. You never had this job. But your investment—of time, energy, hope—was real. You wake up the next morning feeling a loss that logic tells you shouldn’t exist. But it does. Because part of desire is premature ownership. We don’t just want things—we start holding them in our minds, weaving them into the fabric of our lives before they’ve ever materialised. And so, when they don’t, we experience a phantom loss. Something that never truly belonged to us but had, in some way, already made a home within us.

You can grieve a love you never had. A relationship you only imagined but never touched. It starts small—an exchange of greetings, a single moment where you thought this could be something. You meet someone, you say hi, they say hi back, and suddenly, a universe of possibility opens up. You imagine the version of you that exists in their life, the version of them that fits perfectly into yours. And maybe if they had remained a stranger, if you never had to see them again, it wouldn’t have mattered. But they’re there. Right there. Lingering in the background, orbiting just close enough to keep the possibility alive.

And so you wonder: where do we go from here? Do you want me or not? Am I a footnote in the carefully curated life you’ve built, a mere afterthought? Because if I wasn’t, why has hi not turned into hello? And why does my hello now sit unread, like an abandoned thing in the dark corner of your inbox? Like a lost child in a supermarket, clutching at the fabric of your attention, whispering Are you looking for me? Because I have looked at you. And I have found you worthy. And I have called you worthy.

But when I strip away the haze of hope and optimism—what social media would call delusion—I see it clearly. The only logical thing left to do is to call back my hello. To send a rope and pull it out from the gorge of your inbox before it’s squeezed to death by the weight of more important messages. And when my hello returns to me, disheveled and weak, a messenger sent to live but returning in death, I am in awe of how quick I am to begin grieving you. Grieving us. But we never existed. So why does it hurt so bad? Why do I feel withdrawal symptoms? Why am I grieving a love that never was?

We grieve process. We grieve unfulfillment. We grieve the time, energy, and resources we poured into something that did not materialise. Because it is not just about the thing we lost—it is about everything we put into it. Every step we took toward it. Every late-night thought, every carefully crafted message, every moment spent hoping, planning, waiting.

We grieve the version of ourselves that only existed in that reality. The person we would have been if it had worked out. The one who got the job and felt fulfilled. The one who was chosen. The one who was loved. We grieve them because they were real to us, even if only in our minds.

And this is where it gets tricky—because how do you mourn something that never existed? How do you explain to someone that your sadness is over an idea, a version of yourself that was never actualised? How do you articulate the weight of a loss that, technically, never was?

People will tell you to move on, that it wasn’t yours to begin with, as though your grief is misplaced. As though sadness should only belong to what was tangible. But we know better. We know that grief does not follow logic, that it does not need hard proof of existence to settle in your chest like a heavy stone.

And so, we sit with it. The absence of something that was never there, the ghost of a future we had built in our heads. The job that was supposed to change everything. The love that never got the chance to begin. The life that could have been.

Maybe that’s what makes this kind of grief harder—it has no ceremony, no funeral, no rituals to mark its end. There will be a grave but no body. No one will send condolences for the love you never had, for the opportunities that slipped through your fingers before they were ever real. But you will grieve them anyway. Quietly, in stolen moments, in sighs too deep to explain, in the way your body still reacts to a memory that never even had the chance to be made.

And maybe that’s it—losing not just the thing we wanted but the self we had built around it. The version of us that got to live in that world, that got to have that love, that got to wake up in that reality.

Because in the end, we are not just mourning the thing itself. We are mourning the person we could have been.