What If Writing Them Down Means Losing Them?

There’s something that I have never told anyone.

Maybe it’s just me.

Maybe it doesn’t make any sense, but this has been a pattern.

Not once, not twice.

Enough times for me to be afraid.

Whenever I sit down and write about someone, about how much they mean to me, how much I admire them, and how grateful I am that they’re in my life, it feels like I’m counting down to losing them.

And then they leave.

And, all I’m left is with the words I wrote, wondering if I should've just kept them inside me.

Sometimes I even think, maybe my words are cursed.

Or maybe they are envious.

I know that words can’t make people leave. I do know that.

But the moment I finally put them into sentences, it’s as if life quietly takes them away.

Before I can even sit with the happiness of having written about them, they’re already becoming a memory.

Now everytime I want to write about someone, I hesitate.

I close my notebook, I delete the draft.

I’ll think about them.

I’ll smile because of them.

But I won’t write, because what if this time it happens again?

What if the next goodbye begins with a sentence I wrote?

Maybe it’s silly.

Because after losing people over and over, you start becoming careful with everything.

Even your own words.

I’ve spent so much of my life learning what it means to lose people.

To let go even when I wasn’t ready.

To watch pieces of my world disappear one by one.

And every person who leaves takes a small piece of me with them.

A version of myself that only existed because they were there.

Maybe that’s why I become afraid to write anymore.

I’d rather carry people quietly than wonder if writing about them is the beginning of another ending.