Grief is love’s echo

Sometimes I wish I had never known love.

It sounds ungrateful to say that — even unholy. But it’s the truth my heart whispers when the silence of my room feels too loud. I wish I had never known love so I wouldn’t miss it so much, so I wouldn’t know how painful it is to lose it, to no longer experience it the way I once did.

Because the love I miss is not just any love.

I miss being cared for.
I miss feeling safe without needing to earn it.
I miss being loved just for existing.

It’s the kind of love parents give. A love that watches the door until you get home, leaves the light on at night, remembers your favorite dish, and sees your worth even on the days you cannot. My parents are gone now, and with them, that unique love vanished from my daily life.

Nothing — and no one — has been able to replace it.

It is a strange ache to live with: to be old enough to know that you cannot expect anyone else to love you this way, but still young enough to feel the child in you crying for it. And when someone tries to love me, I almost push them away, because deep down I know I’m measuring them against an impossible standard. No partner, no friend, no one could love me like they did.

Some days, this longing makes me want to give up altogether. If no one can love me like that again, what’s the point?

But slowly, painfully, I am learning that this longing isn’t meant to destroy me — it’s meant to teach me. It teaches me that I was loved once, deeply and truly, and that love shaped me. It tells me that my heart is still capable of desiring something pure. And most of all, it points me toward the one Love that never ends — the love of God, who placed me in my parents’ arms and who still sees me, even now, when the loneliness feels unbearable.

I don’t have this all figured out. I still cry, still ache, still wish sometimes that I didn’t know what I had lost. But grief is its own form of love — it is love’s echo, the proof that what you had was real.

And maybe one day, the longing will stop feeling like a wound and start feeling like a doorway — a way back to love, a way forward to healing.