Why I Wrote About the Things I Missed
I wrote about what I missed.
For a long time, I didn't understand the difference.
I thought writing about the past meant being trapped inside it.
I thought that if I wanted to move forward, I had to stop looking backward.
But memory doesn't work that way.
Neither does grief.
Neither does love.
There are things we miss precisely because they mattered to us.
People.
Places.
Possibilities.
Versions of ourselves.
Sometimes we miss a life we never even got to live.
I wrote about those things because pretending I didn't miss them would have been another kind of dishonesty.
There were things I wished had happened differently.
Childhoods that should have felt safer.
Moments that should have been ordinary.
People who should have stayed.
Versions of myself that I wonder about sometimes.
I think about the person I might have become if I had not spent so much of my life learning how to survive.
I don't know who that person would be.
Maybe none of us ever do.
There are entire versions of ourselves that exist only in imagination.
The person we could have been.
The person we thought we would become.
The person we were before something changed us.
Sometimes I miss them.
Not because I want to erase who I am now.
Because I want to acknowledge that they existed too.
That is one of the reasons I wrote this book.
To give names to things that had no place to go.
To let memories exist without pretending they didn't hurt.
To say:
I remember.
I wanted that.
I miss that.
It mattered to me.
There is something deeply human about missing ordinary things.
We often think grief has to be dramatic to deserve words.
It doesn't.
Sometimes we miss a morning.
A conversation.
A feeling of safety.
The version of a room before something happened inside it.
The person we used to be when we still believed certain things were possible.
The strange thing about missing something is that the object of our longing doesn't always have to be good.
We can miss people who hurt us.
We can miss places we needed to leave.
We can miss versions of ourselves that we would never become again.
Human beings are complicated that way.
Love does not always disappear simply because something became painful.
Sometimes we carry both truths.
It hurt me.
I still miss it.
Both can be true.
I think that is why some of my writing circles around the same memories.
I wasn't trying to romanticize them.
I was trying to understand why they still had a pulse inside me.
Writing gave me permission to hold contradictions without immediately solving them.
I could miss something without needing to return to it.
I could love something without pretending it was perfect.
I could grieve something without believing grief meant I had failed to move on.
Perhaps moving forward doesn't require leaving everything behind.
Perhaps sometimes we move forward by learning how to carry the right pieces with us.
That is what some of these poems became.
Small containers for things I couldn't carry any other way.
A memory.
A longing.
A question.
A person.
A life that never happened.
A life I still sometimes wonder about.
I wrote about the things I missed because they were part of me.
And writing them down did something unexpected.
It made the missing feel less like an absence and more like a conversation.
The past could no longer answer me.
But I could finally speak to it.
I could tell it what I never had the words to say.
I could thank it for what was beautiful.
I could mourn what wasn't.
I could admit what I still wished had been different.
And then, eventually, I could close the page.
Not because the memory disappeared.
Because it no longer needed to scream to prove that it existed.
There is a line I keep returning to:
"Ruined rooms can still contain music."
Maybe memories are like those rooms.
Some are beautiful.
Some are broken.
Some are both.
But even the painful ones can contain something worth listening to.
A lesson.
A tenderness.
A warning.
A piece of ourselves we forgot we still had.
That is why I wrote about what I missed.
Not to live there forever.
To give those things a final place to be remembered.
Because sometimes the kindest thing we can do for the past is not to return to it.
It is to acknowledge that it mattered.
Then keep walking.
I don't want to spend the rest of my life looking backward.
There are still books I want to write.
Places I have never seen.
People I have not yet met.
Versions of myself I haven't discovered.
There is still a future waiting to be written.
But I no longer believe that looking toward the future requires me to pretend the past never happened.
I can miss something and still move forward.
I can remember and still become.
I can grieve and still hope.
Maybe that is what these pages were always trying to teach me.
That remembering is not the opposite of healing.
Sometimes remembering is how we finally make room for it.
— Jean T. Hatoum
Author of I Wrote So I Would Not Fade and J’ai Écrit Pour Ne Pas M’effacer
If these words felt like home, the rest of the map is in the book.
And if you are able to, supporting my journey helps me afford the medication that keeps my own fractured ember burning.
I’m not finished surviving out loud. 🕊️
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