The complicated thing about missing someone is that it is never constant. You can go without thinking about them for days, months, years.

Then all it takes is a familiar smell, drifting softly around you during your first visit to a new friend's apartment. Or picking up an old, borrowed sweater from the bottom of your closet during Spring cleaning. Perhaps it happened while reading just the right sentence in a book you only recently started.

Sometimes all it takes is opening your eyes to the sun streaming through your window, and remembering what day it is.

Missing someone can hit you so suddenly that you’re left disoriented. It can leave you feeling lost, except when you look around, you’re in a place you’ve been many times before. You don't remember deciding to go there. Yet, you feel like you had never left.

Missing someone can hurt, right in the center of your stomach, as if you’ve swallowed your weight in regret. Or it can be as small as a buzz by your ear - a memory that you take only a second to acknowledge before brushing it away.

More than it just being difficult, what I know is that missing someone is humbling: it causes you to admit that you are not a solitary force in this world. You allowed someone to change you, and welcomed them into your thoughts as a regular visitor. You experienced them with all of your senses, and remember them more deeply because of it.

There's no shame or embarrassment in saying the words, “I miss you." You're essentially telling another human that you’ve discovered a moment in your life where their absence was evident. You are acknowledging a person-sized gap in your conscience. You are vocalizing your human ability to connect, to disconnect, to yearn. Refusing to acknowledge this feeling out of fear, shows weakness as it is to deny yourself the right to access your own emotions, raw and imperfect as they are.

And honestly? The most complicated thing about missing someone is that, sometimes, it's not complicated at all. It's neither joyful nor sad. You just do.

Never be afraid to say, "I miss you" to another person, to yourself, to the stars, or what ever heaven you believe in. It's in these moments that we can best embrace what makes us human.