How to cope with missing someone

longing✦grief✦loneliness✦love

There is a word in Portuguese, saudade, for the presence of an absence — missing something so thoroughly that the missing itself keeps you company.

You did not choose it, you cannot schedule it, and no one can talk you out of it. But you can give it an address. That is what this page is for.

Why this happens

Longing is not a malfunction of memory; it is memory doing exactly what it was built to do. Attachment research is blunt about this: human brains encode important people as part of their own predictive map — where they are, when they'll answer, how their voice lands. When the person goes, the map keeps firing. Missing someone is the brain continuing to expect them, hundreds of times a day, and being corrected each time.

This is why longing spikes at specific, oddly small triggers — a song, a time of day, the supermarket aisle with their brand in it. Those are map locations. It is also why 'just distract yourself' fails as advice: the map does not get rewritten by being ignored. It gets rewritten by being visited, deliberately, with the new information attached — they are not here now, and I survived the visit.

The old cultures knew this without the neuroscience. They built rituals of longing — letters to the absent, candles in windows, songs to people across the sea — not to end the missing but to give it a form and a schedule, so it did not simply own the whole day.

What we usually do

We fight the wave — and turn one hour of missing into a week of exhaustion.
We feed it in secret: photos at 1 a.m., old messages, their name in a search bar.
We mistake intensity of longing for a signal to act — and send messages we regret.
We announce we're 'over it' to everyone, closing every door the feeling could have left through.
We wait for time to do it alone. Time helps, but only rituals steer.

What we really need

You need to stop treating longing as an emergency and start treating it as correspondence. The missing arrives; you receive it; you answer it in writing; it leaves lighter. A letter to the person you miss — telling them what today was like, what they would have laughed at, what has changed — visits the map on purpose and updates it gently.

And the letter needs a destination that is not their inbox. Somewhere real but apart: a place on a map, a sealed envelope, a drawer. Longing behaves when it has a house of its own. It misbehaves when it lives in yours.

The ritual

When the wave comes, do not fight it — set a kettle, sit down, and give it fifteen honest minutes.
Write to them, present tense, as if catching them up: 'You would not believe what happened at…'
Include one true, small thing — the kind of detail only they would have appreciated.
Do not end with 'come back'. End with what you are doing next, today, without them.
Choose a place in the world that belongs to the two of you, and lose the letter there on the Atlas.
When the wave returns another day, write again. Correspondence, not crisis.

A shape to begin with

Not a template — a scaffold. Take what holds, leave the rest.

Greet them as ever
You'd have hated the weather today. I thought of you before I was awake enough to stop myself.
Report one small thing
The thing you'd want to know is…
Say the missing plainly
I miss you in the specific places: at…, whenever…
Do not summon — release
I'm not asking you back. I'm just not letting the words pile up anymore.
Sign off into your day
Now I'm going to…, and I'll write again when there's something you'd have laughed at.

The words have found their shape.

Now they may need a place.

Lose it in the Atlas Write a letter Keep it for the future Shape a small object

Asked at this door

Why does missing someone come in waves?

Because it's triggered by prediction, not by will. Your brain still expects the person at particular times, places, and cues; each cue fires a wave. The waves get smaller as the expectations update — and writing to the person is one of the gentlest ways to update them on purpose.

Is it unhealthy to write letters to someone I miss?

The opposite, usually. Structured expression — saying the missing fully, in words, with a beginning and an end — is what grief researchers recommend over both suppression and endless rumination. It becomes unhealthy only if the letters replace living, rather than punctuating it.

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