We spend an immense amount of emotional energy mourning what slips through our fingers: friendships that faded without a fight, opportunities missed by a hair's breadth, dreams we outgrew before we could fulfill them.

Our instinct is always to recover, to salvage, to rebuild what cracked. We treat loss as an error in the calculation.

Yet time teaches an unexpected mercy: some things were meant to fall away. If you had kept every person you ever loved, every ambition you ever harbored, and every door you ever knocked on, your life would be an unlivable museum of heavy obligations.

Sometimes, what we mistakenly labelled a tragedy was simply the universe prying open our clenched fists to make room for air.