It's easy to mourn someone you've actually lost. It's an open, hollow, oozing kind of pain that pulses around your entire body. It's breaks through all socials norms, justifies having a total breakdown, falling apart. And it doesn't matter who sees.
But how do you mourn the loss of something you never truly had to begin with? The emptiness throbs with each beat of your heart, pulsing like a bruise hidden deep beneath the skin. The "what-if" and the "might have been", the "could've, should've, would've". Nobody knows they're there, and so you suffer in silence. And nobody can ever know they're there because, let's face it, what's the point anyhow?
After all there's a status quo to be maintained.
Our monument, her monument, had become a national landmark. People flew across the country to see it like they did with the Statue of Liberty or the St. Louis Arch. There were tours and throngs of screaming children and security guards armed with fake authority. And there were always, always flowers. Dozens, hundreds, all half-dead and baking in the California heat. People who had never even known her left tributes to her memory, as if they had lost something. As if they missed her.
But they never even knew her. They didn't know what real loss was.
I did. I do.
I just never brought her flowers.