Gone

If I Was Gone Tonight

If I was gone tonight, would anyone notice?

Would the world hiccup, rearrange, hold its breath for a moment? Or would it slide on, polite and practiced, leaving a small wake of texts and an obligatory memorial—pictures posted, teary comments, a few people who remembered to show up?

I’ve been turning this over in the dark: the strange arithmetic of presence and absence. We mark births with candles and parties; we mark deaths with flowers and hashtags. But what about the long, quiet in-between where no one calls to say hello? What about the spaces where you exist and nobody asks to stay?

I’m not begging. Let’s be honest: I’m not standing on a street corner with a sign, pleading for company. I don’t need a rescue. What stings is simpler and colder — the pattern. If I died tonight, the calculus says: a few people would gather because it’s what you do. A handful would attend because memory or duty nudges them. There might be a small wake, a small memorial. Polite, like a practiced script.

And that would be it.

Nobody would lose sleep for long. My absence would be a footnote in someone’s month. My name would live on, briefly—an exhaled thought from faces that never dialed my number, hands that never reached for me. The truth is both petty and profound: I’m not sought. No one is looking for me in the way that matters.

There is an ache to that. Not just loneliness — which itself is an old, familiar pain — but the recognition that being unseen and being unmissed are different wounds. You can be dazzled in a room yet invisible when the lights go out. You can be part of the furniture of someone else’s life and still not be a person they’d search for.

Maybe that should make me smaller. Maybe it should make me desperate. Instead, it makes me honest. I see where I have given my tenderness to people who never learned the grammar of returning it. I see the long practice of excusing absence, of treating silence as normal. I see how the culture around us teaches us to believe that worth is broadcast in scale—likes, rooms, the loud pulse of public attention—when real worth is quieter and harder to measure.

So here’s the thing I’ve decided to do with this thought-experiment, this imagined funeral rehearsal: I will not shrink. I will not confect drama or punish anyone. I will keep living in ways that matter to me — fiercely, messily, and with the particular light I carry. I will hold my own attention long enough that I stop depending on someone else’s appetite for me as proof of my value.

If you happen to be reading this: you might be someone who would show up if I were gone. You might be someone who wouldn’t. Either way, know this — I am not a test. I am a person. I welcome the company of those who seek me, but I will not barter my worth for it.

And to the ones who never dialed, never asked, or never knocked: I forgive you, partly because I can’t carry that weight for both of us. I forgive you because forgiveness is a leash I release so I can walk free. But I will not pretend the invisibility didn’t leave a mark.

If I died tonight, there would be a small, polite memorial. There would be stories told in the margins and a few sudden rain-showers named after me. But I intend to outgrow that tiny, tidy ending. I intend to make mornings and small rituals that celebrate me — breakfasts I like, songs I keep, rooms I claim. I intend to be a person someone can miss because I’ll have given them something to miss: a truth, a laugh, a stubborn, unignorable presence.

So don’t wait for a funeral notice to remember me. Reach out on a Tuesday. Bring coffee. Say the small thing that keeps me in your mouth. Or don’t. Either way, I will keep living so that if the world ever has to learn to miss me, it will have something worth missing.