Growing up means learning what life is. When you’re little, you have a set of ideals, standards, criteria, plans, outlooks, and you think that you have to sit around and wait for them to happen to you and then life will work. But life isn’t like that, for anybody; you can’t fall in love with a standard, you have to fall in love with a person. You can’t live in a criteria, you have to live your life. You can’t wait for your plans to materialize, because they may never materialize the way you think they will. You can’t wait to watch your ideals and standards walk up to you, because you can’t know what’s yours until you have it. I always say, always take the first chance in case you never get a second one, but growing up takes that even one step further, growing up means that you have to hold on to what you have, when you have it, because what you have- that’s yours- and all the ideals and criteria you have set in your head, those aren’t yours, because those haven’t happened to you.

- C. JoyBell C.

You’ll not only miss the memories you do have, the person you did know, but you will also miss the memories you could have had, the person they would have become. You’ll miss the uncertainty of having them here, the wide-open future of them. We never miss the future until it’s taken away.

You find yourself wondering what you’d say to them if you only had one more conversation. You build these grandiose monologues in your mind, where you tell them how much you love them, how much they built you into the human being you are today, and how beautiful it was to have known them. The truth is, though, despite all these beautiful things you could say, you know you’d be fully satisfied with just a simple hello.

The Art Of Coping: On Missing Someone Who Is Gone.