The Pain of Missing: A Ritual

Sara Hefny
Nov 6 · 3 min read
Listening to: Habibi Wayno — Ziad Bourji

You find yourself getting used to the pain of missing. You’ve left people and places and things so many times that it has become a ritual that you have come to expect, though never enjoy. At first it’s acute — the sting of your eyes watering without warning, the tightening of your chest as your lungs constrict and your breaths come short and shallow. The last time you left the agent at the security checkpoint stared openly at you as you sobbed while placing your 3 oz. liquids in a plastic bin. The screen showing the gates blurred as you dab frantically at your eyes. There’s nothing poetic about crying alone in an airport at five o’clock in the morning — rather than look at you with sympathy, fellow passengers pray to whoever it is in the sky that they won’t be sitting next to the woman who is bound to be sniffling into her tissues for the next 10 hours. As someone constantly worried about la brutta figura, you try to pull yourself together in those moments because, frankly, it’s embarassing. Keep it together.

Keeping it together marks the next part of missing — willing yourself to keep it from bubbling to the surface. I’ve found that there is only a certain amount of time that other people will let you wallow in your saudade before they need you to just getoveritalready because you’re really bumming them out. So, you learn to cry in mostly appropriate places, like your car, or the shower, or the bathroom at your place of employment. You learn to only look at the pictures and videos that your friends send you when you’re alone so that when the tears inevitably pile up under your lower lid, you can let them spill down your cheeks instead of tilting your head back and willing your eyeballs to soak them back up.

By the time you’ve reached chronic missing it feels like that headache that used to interfere with your day-to-day life but now has become like a layer of fog that makes everything you do a little hazy but doesn’t put you in actual danger of revealing your missing to anyone. You go to work, you go out with friends, you make revisions to your dissertation. You don’t work out, the longest period of physical inactivity you’ve experienced since puberty, and yet it doesn’t show because you don’t really eat, either. You wake up, sometimes to the alarm, sometimes at 3:45 AM on the dot for a week straight because whothehellknowswhy.

And it’s not just you who goes through these phases of missing, so do the people you’ve left behind. In the beginning it’s all messages full of I miss you’s and when are you coming back’s. The flood of messages slow to a trickle of regular updates on life — V is still looking for a job and E is obsessed with her new baby girl and Y got into a fight at work and broke a rib and D still hasn’t got his broken refrigerator replaced. Your heart flutters when the phone buzzes and you find yourself sending stupid memes in your group chats just to keep conversation going.

The fog of missing thickens when you realize that you’re being forgotten. The messages slow from multiple times a day, to daily, to once a week, but you generally have to initiate. You test yourself to see how long you can go without writing someone, waiting for them to first ask you how you’re doing. You’re not mad — they have lives and friends of their own and really, you should be paying more attention to your own life and your friends who actually live in the same city. And yet it hurts, every waking moment that you’re not there and they’re not telling you that they miss you. You live at the 47th parallel and it starts to get dark at stupid early hours anyway, so you are in bed by 6:30, tearing through borrowed library books at a startling rate in an attempt to stay awake until a more reasonable hour.

You wonder if it was a good idea to book that ticket to go back later in the year. Going back only restarts the cycle of missing. How many cycles can you take?

Written by

professional observer of people//recollections, rants & raves//fact + fiction

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