Anna, you miss him.” “All the time. I still can’t believe he’s gone.” The words come out in a whoosh, tasting funny in my mouth. No matter how many times I say them, they still feel like a garbled, impossible language. My chest hurts, and I have to hold my breath to keep from inhaling a deep sob. “He was more than your best friend.” I nod absently, forgetting myself for a moment, forgetting that I’m talking to Jayne and not my journal. “I – I mean, he was like a brother to me. You know, like Frankie. Well, she’s the sister. I mean–” Jayne reaches for my hands across the table, shaking her head softly. “Sweetheart, when you say Matt’s name, you have the same look in your eyes that he’d get whenever he’d say yours.

Do we miss not only the past but every future the lost past describes? Is that just the nature of missing? All the lost might-have-beens? The certainty that those uncertain futures are gone?

...There was no point in sighing after what I could not have. It only distracted me from what I did have.

In fact, if our kids are successful in every normal way, they can still miss God's main mark.

If we’re missing life it’s probably because we’re expecting it to reveal itself to us, rather than realizing that life is revealed by us looking for it.

Oh, Mercédès, I have spoken your name with sighs of melancholy, with groans of pain and with the croak of despair. I have spoken it frozen with cold, huddled on the straw of my dungeon. I have spoken it raging with heat and rolling around on the stone floor of my prison. Mercédès, I must have my revenge, because for fourteen years I suffered, fourteen years I wept and cursed. Now, I say to you, Mercédès, I must have my revenge!

I miss being the age when I thought I'd have my shit together by the time I was the age I am now..

I can’t sleep alone anymoreand I get used tocompanytoo quickly. You’re always gone too soon.

When we turn to the heavens to look for inspiration, we miss the most important piece, and that is the person right there next to us.

I miss you so much. Maybe if I say your name over and over again, it will eventually feel wrong to me. Like a word you write too many times suddenly doesn't look right anymore. I will try that.