Betrayal should have an expiration date. How useless is it to feel betrayed by a dead person?

Nobody tells you that death changes nothing for you in terms of emotions. Dead people can still hurt you, they can make you cry, and they for sure can make you feel ridiculous about all that.

During all this time, I’ve learned to understand grief—the waves of it that crush you underneath, the space in between that increases with time, the early warning signs that make you run to the toilet in hiding. Grief is all the same after a while; when you know, you know.

But feelings towards the dead are a special kind of punishment. One that you cannot control or escape but just feel. And after those crush you, all that you are left with, are unanswered questions, so many questions for which you will never know the answer, will never process, never confirm, always doubt.

You will never know the truth, the intentions, the subtitles left in the half-words whispered, or the conversations that said too little.

It can get you crazy: the recap of everything you talked about, the uncertainties, the half-truths, and the imagining of what the other person was thinking and feeling. And the sense that you still own them something? Just because you loved them, then you owned them loyalty, secrets, hidden baggage.

No matter how much you think you broke free from the dead, the truth is, for eternity, until you die, you never will. They died, you didn’t. They stopped feeling, but you didn’t.

It was game over for then; that is the real tragedy. But you remain awfully human and full of useless emotions you do not always understand.

Blame the dead because you cannot blame human nature.