Before Loss
A reflection on possibility, consciousness, and why we grieve what never happened.
Lately, I have found myself thinking about what it really means to miss something.
Perhaps it began because someone came into my life whom I care about deeply. I don’t know where this story will lead.
Nothing has happened. Nothing has ended. Yet somehow, I was already afraid.
That surprised me. How can I fear losing something that I have not yet lost?
That question stayed with me far longer than I expected.
For most of my life, I assumed that we only realise we have missed something after it is gone. We look back and quietly say,
“I wish…”
“If only…”
“I missed it.”
But what if the story is still unfolding? What exactly am I afraid of now?
Perhaps missing is not something we discover only afterwards. It begins much earlier—the moment a future becomes imaginable.
The more I thought about it, the less personal it became.
I began to wonder whether missing was really about relationships at all.
From the perspective of the universe, nothing seems to be “missed.”
Matter does not regret the form it might have taken. Energy does not mourn the paths it never followed. Evolution does not pause to wonder about the countless lives that never came into existence.
The universe simply continues. One moment becomes another. One arrangement gives rise to the next.
Everything changes.
Everything transforms.
But nothing looks back.
Perhaps comparison has never been a property of the universe.
It made me wonder whether it is, instead, a property of consciousness.
Maybe that is what makes us human.
We do not simply experience reality; we constantly compare it with realities that never happened. We imagine conversations that were never spoken, decisions we never made, and lives we never lived. Sometimes those invisible worlds become so vivid that they begin to feel almost as real as the one before us.
Yet we can never know whether those unwritten futures would truly have been happier, because reality never had the chance to test them.
Then another thought quietly appeared.
Perhaps I am not afraid of losing a person.
Perhaps I am afraid of losing a future that two people might have created together.
I choose that word carefully.
Might.
Not would.
Not should.
Only might.
Almost everything meaningful begins this way.
Trust.
Friendship.
Love.
None of them begins as certainty.
They begin as possibility.
Perhaps that is why missing feels so uniquely human.
Life is full of possibilities that never become reality. Every choice quietly closes another path. Every meeting also contains countless meetings that will never happen.
I am beginning to think that missing is not an accident of life.
It has always been woven into its very structure.
But if missing is part of being alive, why does it hurt so much?
I don’t think it is because we dislike uncertainty, nor because we cannot accept change.
It comes from something much quieter.
Sometimes, despite caring deeply, we know that the future has never belonged entirely to us.
No relationship exists in isolation.
Time plays a part.
Distance plays a part.
Health.
Chance.
The lives that two people were already living before they ever met.
So many invisible forces quietly shape every story long before we know how it will end.
Perhaps our helplessness comes from recognising that some futures cannot be created by one person alone.
Not because we failed to stay.
But because staying has never been something we could decide entirely by ourselves.
Strangely, I don’t find that thought hopeless.
I find it profoundly human.
The universe never grieves for a future that never happened.
Only human beings can stand in the present while quietly mourning a world that never came into existence.
Perhaps we do not live only in reality.
Perhaps we also live, silently and constantly, among the possibilities that remain forever unwritten.
I don’t know where this story will lead.
Perhaps one day I will look back and realise that my fears were unnecessary.
I simply don’t know.
But perhaps that is not the most important question.
Perhaps the more interesting question is this:
Why are human beings able to grieve for futures that have never existed?
And perhaps that is both the beauty…
and the burden…
of being conscious enough to imagine tomorrow before it arrives.