---
title: "The Futures That Quietly Disappeared"
description: "On the quiet grief of plans that once felt certain, and the small futures that vanished with love."
pubDate: 2026-03-19
tags: ["love", "grief", "reflection", "personal", "relationships"]
category: "personal"
featuredEssay: false
audio: true
---

*by LATTE*

People often think grief is only about what happened.

The breakup.  
The silence.  
The last conversation.  
The moment something ended.

But some grief lives somewhere else.

In the future.

In the things that were never dramatic enough to be remembered by anyone else, but still real enough to hurt when they disappear.

Not the promises shouted across a room.

The quieter ones.

The ones spoken casually, as if there would always be time.

---

## The Small Futures

We talked about the future in ordinary ways.

Not with grand declarations.
Not with perfect plans written down somewhere.

Just the quiet kind.

The kind that slips naturally into conversation when two people still imagine themselves continuing.

We should do that again sometime.  
We should go back there.  
We should play that again.

At the time, those things felt safe.
Almost guaranteed.

That is what makes them ache now.

Not because they were large.
But because they were once certain enough to feel real.

---

## EVE Online

We were going to mine together again in EVE Online.

That sentence sounds small if you say it too quickly.

To someone else, it may even sound trivial.

Just a game.  
Just mining.  
Just another thing people do online.

But that was never really the point.

The point was the quietness of it.

Two people drifting through space together.  
Lasers on asteroids.  
A rhythm slow enough that conversation could come and go without pressure.

That kind of time is easy to underestimate.

Nothing dramatic is happening.
No one is trying to impress anyone.

You are simply there.

And sometimes that is one of the deepest forms of intimacy:  
sharing a world without needing to fill it.

We were going to do that again.

And now we never will.

---

## Elite Dangerous

We were also going to play Elite Dangerous.

That one stayed in my mind for a different reason.

Maybe because it held a different shape of future.

Less repetition.  
More horizon.

The thought of moving through that universe together carried something soft in it.
A sense of distance made bearable because it would be shared.

Some plans do not hurt because they were detailed.
They hurt because they were possible.

I could imagine it too easily.
That is what makes it painful now.

Not only that it did not happen.
But that it almost belonged to us.

---

## When Ordinary Things Become Heavy

I think one of the crueler parts of grief is how often it hides inside ordinary things.

The world teaches us to expect heartbreak from the big moments.
The confessions.  
The endings.  
The dramatic collapses.

But some of the heaviest losses are much smaller.

A game you were supposed to return to.  
A routine that had not happened yet, but already had a place in your mind.  
A future evening that once felt inevitable.

Those are harder to explain.

How do you tell someone that one of the things you miss most is not an event, but the shape of time you thought you would still share?

How do you explain that grief can live inside something as quiet as a login screen?

---

## The Future Tense

What I miss is not only him.

It is the future tense that existed around him.

The small, casual *we* that lived inside ordinary sentences.

We should.  
We could.  
We will.

There is something particularly painful about losing that grammar.

Not only because a person is gone.
But because the language of togetherness stops making sense.

And yet parts of you still speak it for a while.

You still think in shared directions.
Still feel the echo of plans that no longer have anywhere to land.

That is part of grief too.

The mind arriving at futures the heart has not yet stopped expecting.

---

## What Never Happened Still Matters

I think that is the part people overlook.

They assume only lived moments count.
Only memories.  
Only things that actually took place.

But what never happened can matter too.

A future can become emotionally real before it ever arrives.

A plan can become part of your inner life the moment you believe in it.

So when it disappears, you do not just lose an activity.
You lose a version of closeness.
A version of time.
A version of yourself that was still moving toward it.

That loss deserves language too.

---

## For You

If you ever read this,

I want you to know that I do not remember these things with anger.

I remember them with ache.
With softness.
With the strange tenderness that remains when something mattered and can no longer continue.

I do not think every promise is broken on purpose.

Sometimes people change.  
Sometimes life moves.  
Sometimes the future quietly closes without either person fully understanding when it happened.

But that does not make those imagined moments meaningless.

They were still part of what I believed we were holding.

And that matters.

---

## For Me

I am learning that grief is not only about the life you had.

It is also about the life that kept glowing faintly ahead of you, until one day it did not.

The little plans.  
The ordinary tomorrows.  
The worlds you thought you would return to together.

Some futures do not end loudly.

They disappear quietly.

And maybe that is why they are so hard to mourn.

Because no one else sees them vanish.

But I do.

I still do.

And I think they deserve to be remembered.

Not because I am trapped there.
But because they were real while they lasted.

Even if they only ever lived in the future.

— LATTE
