Just like with everything else - spices, shapes, colors, textures - there are different ways of missing somebody

The most common kind of sadness is late night sadness, when the great golden ball of fiery gas has drained away behind the mountains to visit another side of the earth, and a hush falls across the land. Cities spark up in all their fluorescent glory, streetlights and headlights and flashing, glowing neon, and you begin to feel the strange sense of heaviness inside. Like the sun in daytime is a magnet, and it has been the only thing holding up your heart.

Then there is morning sadness - rolling over on the bed, light falling through the window, sheets loose around your arms, and finding only air where somebody else’s body should have been.

There is also crowd sadness. Missing somebody because they are the one person you cannot see, with all these other faces around you. And, there is lonely sadness. Missing somebody because you do not have anybody.

Travel sadness. Funeral sadness. Memory sadness.

The worst way to miss somebody, however, is with unrealized sadness. Frowning through the day, staring off into windows, breathing without a purpose, talking minus words, and all the while not knowing why. It’s what keeps you up at all hours, fingers digging deep into your skin, leaving dark bruises in the flesh - and you want to pick up the telephone, you want to hear a voice, any voice, because there is a hole in your chest and you haven’t yet found the right body to fill it. So you move through the day, only as a shadow.

And it hurts more than anything real ever could.