Ironically, everyone thinks that their absence does not affect me. I suppose I do give off a rather detached and apathetic vibe, but the funny thing about apathy is that it isn’t real. Everyone cares; they just don’t want you to know that. Or maybe I care too much, and I assume that everyone else cares less than me, so I pretend to be apathetic. Either way, my apathy isn’t real.

I have been left by everyone I have every really loved, not in a pitiful way, just in a constant and repetitious way. When I was five, one of my first best friends moved away. I don’t even remember what she looked like now, but that was the first time I realized that people are not permanent, only their impressions are. When I finished middle school, all of my friends made the conscious decision to abandon me at my birthday party, hence why I refuse to celebrate it now. By the time I graduated high school, I had five different best friends, all of whom transferred to private schools at separate times. Maybe there is something about me that makes people want to leave, or maybe I just happen to latch on to people who make no promise to stay. Maybe people do not really love me; they love the versions of myself that I spin for them. Maybe I am not vulnerable or open enough to convince people that I have something to offer, though I always thought that I was so messy and I never understood how people could wash me off of their hands so easily. Maybe people just don’t think I care, but I do. I always do.

I think I could be the poster-child for abandonment issues, but I also think in each of us is this irrevocable fear of being left behind. There is a hole the shape of each person that leaves, and no one else can ever fill this space. Why would you ever want anyone else to fill that space? If someone mattered enough that you miss them, their particular-ness will never be made anodyne by someone else. Everyone matters, everyone is connected in this arbitrary, cosmic way, and it is impossible that being left will not hurt. No one is entirely apathetic, lest you count sociopaths who are an entirely different case. I think we often forget that we leave pieces of ourselves in each person we meet, and we also take pieces from each person we meet. Every time we leave, we lose a piece and take a piece of someone else, like a complicated jigsaw puzzle we will never be able to solve.

You may think that you do not matter, but let me assure you that you do. People will miss you, or at the very least whatever you provided for them, whether that was warmth, comfort, or just someone to talk to. I think we have to realize at some point that we matter because in the process of this self-deprecation we minimize how much we affect other people. It is so unfortunate that we will never see ourselves through the eyes of someone else or how much we matter to that person, but we do matter, and when we leave, we do leave a mark.