It’s 00:23 and my seventh week in hospital. I can’t sleep and don’t... - The Guy Called Sacha (@theguysacha) • Collective

It’s 00:23 and my seventh week in hospital. I can’t sleep and don’t know where or how to share how I feel. So maybe here. I miss my identity. I haven’t been in my home or in my clothes for weeks. I haven’t had my coffee from my favourite place or that cheeky pastry on a Friday. The antibiotics have changed how I smell, I’ve not been able to be to the barbers and I’ve lost 12kg. I don’t look like me. Being unable to sleep due to noise, feeling ill and them not knowing what the cause is, well it’s changing who I am. Even as someone who has seen dark days before, I always seem to find a flicker of joy or hope. But now I’m just homesick for a life that I loved. So there we go. I needed to say it somewhere.

musti.dab

I think that’s one of the strangest things about losing someone who is still alive. Nothing disappears all at once. The person leaves first. The habits take longer. The conversations you continue inside your head take even longer. And the future might be the last thing to leave. I don’t only miss you. I miss things that never even happened. Trips we talked about but never took. Summers we never reached. Ordinary Sundays. Getting older. Going to the swimming pool, just the two of us Spending one New Year’s Eve together.

musti.dab

There are still things I want to tell you. Small things, mostly. A plant I finally learned the name of. Something stupid one of my cats did. A sentence I heard on the street that would have made you laugh. A tree somewhere in Berlin carrying fruit, the kind we would have stopped to inspect as if discovering it ourselves. Sometimes something happens and my first thought is still: I have to tell you this. And for one tiny second, you still exist exactly where you used to. Then I remember. There is nowhere to send it anymore.