---
title: "The Things We Never Got To Do"
description: "On the quiet grief of plans that no longer have a future."
pubDate: 2026-03-16
tags: ["love", "grief", "reflection", "personal"]
category: "personal"
featuredEssay: false
draft: false
audio: true
---

*by LATTE*

People often think grief is about what happened.

But sometimes grief is about what never will.

Not the fights.
Not the ending.

The small futures that quietly disappeared.

---

## The Future We Spoke About

We made plans.

Not the big dramatic kind that people announce loudly.

Just the quiet ones.

The kind you say while sitting next to each other at night.
The kind that feel so natural you assume they will happen.

"We should do that again sometime."

And at the time, it felt obvious that we would.

---

## EVE Online

We used to talk about going back.

Mining together again.

Not because mining is exciting.
Anyone who has played EVE knows it isn't.

But because it was ours.

The slow rhythm of lasers on asteroids.
Talking while the ships drifted quietly through space.

A calm kind of companionship.

The kind where nothing dramatic is happening
but the presence of the other person fills the room anyway.

We said we would go back one day.

We never did.

And now we never will.

---

## Elite Dangerous

There was another plan too.

Exploring together.

Two ships drifting through impossible distances.

Jumping between stars.

Finding strange systems and naming moments after the places we discovered.

You once said it would be fun to do that together.

And I believed you.

I could picture it so clearly.

But some futures disappear before they ever begin.

---

## The Quiet Weight of Promises

None of these promises were dramatic.

They were simple.

That's what makes them heavy now.

Because they felt so certain.

No one expects that the ordinary things will vanish.

You expect big plans to change.

You don't expect small shared moments to disappear completely.

But they do.

And sometimes those small things hurt the most.

---

## What I Miss

I don't just miss you.

I miss the space where those futures lived.

The version of life where those evenings still existed somewhere ahead.

Where logging into a game together still made sense.

Where saying *"we should do that again"* meant something.

Where *we* still existed in the future tense.

---

## The Strange Shape of Missing Someone

Missing someone isn't always dramatic.

Sometimes it's quiet.

Sometimes it appears when you open a game
and realize there is no one left to share that world with.

Sometimes it appears when you remember something that was supposed to happen.

Not something that did.

Something that almost did.

Something that was waiting.

Something that now has nowhere to go.

---

## For You

If you ever read this—

I don't hold those promises against you.

Plans are fragile things.

Life changes.

People change.

But those moments still mattered to me.

Even the ones that never happened.

Especially those.

Because they were part of the life I thought we were building.

---

## For Me

I am learning something strange about love.

Even when the future disappears
the meaning of what we felt doesn't.

The plans vanish.

The person walks away.

But the moments where we believed in those futures
still exist somewhere inside me.

And maybe that's the quiet truth of it all.

The things we never got to do together
still became part of my life.

Even if they never happened.

— LATTE
