The Pieces We Become

I think pieces of us live inside every person we’ve ever loved. Like we’re made up of borrowed fragments, little echoes of the people who have passed through us and stayed even after they left. Sometimes it’s in the songs we can’t skip because they sound like the version of ourselves that existed beside them. Sometimes it’s a phrase we still use, without realizing it’s a ghost of their voice on our tongue. There are movies that still ache like memory, not because of the story, but because of the way the light once fell across their face while they watched it. There are foods we crave that taste like a night that no longer exists, scents that pull us into a moment we thought we’d forgotten. It’s strange, almost holy, how love leaves fingerprints on us… soft, invisible marks that time can’t quite wash away. The people we’ve loved become mirrors, and through them, we meet ourselves again and again. Each reflection a little different, each one revealing a version we might have never known without them.

It’s almost like we’re never fully formed on our own. We enter this world as sketches, faint lines and empty spaces, and it’s the people we meet who fill us in. Each connection shades us with a new color, adds texture to the parts of us that once felt flat. A friend shows us softness in the way they listen without fixing. A lover teaches us patience when timing becomes its own kind of devotion. Heartbreak drags us through the fire, burning away illusion until all that’s left is truth. Even the fleeting ones leave fingerprints, a stranger’s kindness that reminds us the world isn’t always cruel, a passing conversation that lingers like perfume long after it’s gone. We collect these fragments the way beachcombers gather shells, not realizing how they fit until one day we look down and see the mosaic of who we’ve become. The pattern isn’t perfect, but it’s ours, stitched together by touch and loss and the quiet grace of being shaped by others.

But the strangest thing is how we only notice the missing pieces when they’re gone. It’s like living in a house where one room suddenly disappears… you can still move through the rest of it, but something feels wrong, off-balance, like a light you can’t find the switch for. That’s the quiet cruelty of loss… it’s not just their absence you mourn, it’s the collapse of the version of yourself that could only exist beside them. The you who laughed louder because they were there to echo it. The you who felt braver because their belief in you made courage feel effortless. When someone you love dies, it’s not only their heartbeat that stops, it’s the rhythm they created in you. The way their presence harmonized with yours until you couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began. So when they go, it feels like something vital unthreads inside you. That piece was never fully yours; it was born in the space between you, a shared pulse, a sacred overlap of souls. You can’t carry it alone because it wasn’t meant to survive in isolation. It was a language that needed two voices, and now you’re left holding the silence.

Maybe that’s what grief really is… not just mourning them, but trying to relearn yourself in their absence. It’s waking up and realizing that the person you used to be only exists in the past tense now, that the version of you they once held has no place to return to. It’s like standing over a puzzle you’ve spent years building together and realizing one of the most beautiful pieces is missing… not misplaced, but gone for good. You keep trying to fit other things into that space: distractions, memories, work, noise. But nothing clicks. The outline remains empty, echoing. And yet, somehow, the absence becomes its own kind of presence. Over time, you start to notice the way their love still shapes you, in how you speak their name softly to yourself, in the lessons they carved into your bones, in the quiet strength that rises when you least expect it. The picture may never look the same, but maybe it isn’t supposed to. Maybe the love they left behind is what frames you now, the invisible thread that keeps the edges of your life from unraveling completely. And maybe that’s the sacred secret of it all, that we don’t really lose each other. We just become part of everyone who comes next, scattering pieces of our love like breadcrumbs for others to find, teaching one another, again and again, what it means to belong.

And maybe that’s the best part of love, that even in their absence, we keep finding them everywhere. In the warmth of a stranger’s laugh that sounds just like theirs. In the song that randomly shuffles on when you need it most. In the way the sky looks on certain evenings, painted in their favorite color as if the universe still remembers what they loved. Grief has this way of blurring the lines between what’s gone and what remains. One moment you’re certain they’ve vanished completely, and the next you swear you feel them sitting beside you, just out of sight, humming through the walls of your chest. Maybe that’s not imagination… maybe it’s the soul’s way of reminding us that love doesn’t disappear; it just changes form. It moves from touch to memory, from voice to vibration, from body to presence. They live on in the places they once loved, in the people they shaped, in the stories we keep telling. Maybe we never stop being made of each other. Maybe that’s the point, that love’s true work begins not in holding on, but in learning how to keep recognizing each other through the ever-shifting constellations of what remains.

So maybe the real beauty isn’t in holding the pieces perfectly together, but in realizing we were never meant to. We were meant to keep changing shape… to be rewritten by love, undone by loss, and remade by every soul that ever touched ours. Maybe the ache that lingers is proof that it mattered, that something sacred once lived between you and another heart. Because love doesn’t end, it just rearranges itself… turning into memory, into strength, into the quiet knowing that you’ve been forever altered by their existence. And if you listen closely, beneath the ache, you’ll hear it… the faint hum of connection that never really stopped, the reminder that every person we love leaves a piece of themselves inside us. And maybe that’s what being human truly means: to spend a lifetime becoming a mosaic of everyone we’ve ever dared to love.

Author’s Note:
Originally written: June 9, 2022 - What remains after love rearranges us.

I wrote this years ago on Chris’s birthday. I guess I was feeling nostalgic, pulled backward by that familiar tide of memory that never really leaves me alone for long. Reading it now, it still rings true. Maybe even more so. I still believe we’re made up of all the people we’ve ever dared to love. Every person who’s touched my life has left something behind… a mannerism, a song, a phrase, a way of looking at the world. I think that’s what makes us human, really… we’re all just walking collages of everyone we’ve ever held close. If I were to peel away all the borrowed pieces… the laughter that isn’t mine, the softness someone else taught me, the courage I inherited from those who loved me through my breaking… I’m not sure who would be left. Maybe no one. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe we were never meant to exist untouched. Maybe love’s whole purpose is to blur the lines between where we end and someone else begins.

Chris is one of the biggest pieces, one I never wanted to lose. His absence still rearranges me, even now. But I think he’d smile knowing how much of him still lives in the way I write, the way I feel, the way I love. The truth is, I don’t think any of us ever stop belonging to the ones we love. We just learn to carry them differently…in our habits, in our hearts, in the stories we keep telling. I like to think Chris would understand that. That he’d see how much of him still threads through the spaces I fill with words. That even now, I’m still learning who I am through the people I’ve loved, and especially through the ones I had to learn to live without.

I love deeply; I always have. And sometimes that kind of love leaves me raw, like skin that’s forgotten how to protect itself. There are days it feels like a gift, the way I can see beauty in the smallest things: a shared song, the curve of someone’s handwriting, the way laughter lingers in a room long after they’ve gone. But there are other days it feels like a curse, to carry so much of what no longer belongs to me. My heart keeps collecting people like constellations, bright points that once formed something whole, now scattered across a sky I can’t stop searching in longing. I still trace their outlines, even when the light has gone out, whispering their names like prayers I know won’t be answered. Loving like this means learning to live with ghosts that still reach for you in dreams, to cherish the fragments left behind by those who chose to leave. It’s realizing that even if someone walks away, you can’t unwrite the way they rearranged your soul. The ache becomes the evidence, the quiet reminder that you’ve loved deeply enough to be marked by it, and that maybe being marked at all is its own kind of grace.

I used to think loss meant something was taken from me, but now I see it differently. Every love, every goodbye, every piece that remains… It’s all part of the same sacred design. We’re not meant to stay untouched; we’re meant to keep changing, keep remembering, keep loving anyway.