It was almost a year ago.
A spider accidentally drowned in the bathtub.
Not a metaphor. Not a symbol. A real spider.
Small, delicate, curled in on itself. Its little body in the water puddle.
I picked it up gently and laid it out on the coffee table, hoping maybe it was just stunned. Maybe it needed to dry.
Maybe it would wake up.

I left the room for a moment.
When I came back, the spider was gone, thrown away.
No ceremony. No goodbye.

I felt the kind of grief that punches through logic. The kind that makes no sense to the people around you. The kind you can’t explain. I know because I had tears in my eyes when he said he threw it out, the kind of tears he could not relate to and didn’t even take seriously.

But I knew this wasn’t just about a spider.

Because I’m still not over it. After almost a year.

This was about every goodbye I never got to say; laid in front of my eyes in the form of a bathroom spidey I had formed a mild emotional attachment to, whose accidental death was my fault, and it was thrown out by the person I loved.

In my life, people leave.
Not dramatically. Not loudly.
Just… suddenly. Quietly. When I’m not looking.

Loved ones pass away when I’m away.
Breakups happen over the phone.
Pets are gone when I’m away.
Endings, real ones, never seem to happen face to face.

There are no doors closing. No farewell hugs.
Just empty space. A sudden absence. A vacuum that no one acknowledges.

So I carry them.
All of them.
Inside.

That spider cracked something open in me.

Because I wanted to sit beside it.
Watch. Wait. Witness.
And if it didn’t come back, I wanted to give it a good goodbye.
A sacred one.
Even if it was “just” a spider.

But I wasn’t given that chance.

And that’s been the theme.
The life pattern. The grief blueprint.

“I wasn’t given that chance.”

What do you do when life refuses to give you closure?

You get it in your dreams at night.

You get it in the wind that makes you remember a certain moment in your life.

You get it by making new memories by yourself in the places you used to go together. In the streets you laughed, kissed, argued… Lived life. Even briefly.