I don't know. Shit. What do you want from me?

There's a television in another room that you can't stop listening to, which would be fine, except you're pretty sure the show was cancelled before the pilot even aired.

No finale. No resolution. Not even a proper cliffhanger — just some network executive somewhere shrugging and saying we're going in a different direction, and the room going quiet, and you, alone on your couch, still waiting for the next episode like an absolute idiot.

This is, embarrassingly, the most accurate way you can describe what it feels like to mourn an 'almost'.

You are grieving a pitch meeting. You are holding a candlelight vigil for a rough draft. You didn't even lose something — you lost the implication of something, which is so much worse because you can't even explain it to anyone without watching their face do the thing where they're being supportive but also clearly think you should have moved on by now.

They're right. You know they're right.

You are also not moving on.

The 'what-if' is the most useless machine ever invented and you run yours like it's load-bearing.

Like if you just find the right angle — the version where you said something different, something smarter, something that landed instead of just hanging there in the air — you'll finally understand what it was. What you were, to them. Whether you were a thought they had and dismissed or a thought they had and kept, quietly, the way you kept them.

You need to know this for absolutely no practical reason whatsoever. The information would change nothing.

You want it anyway.

And you know it wouldn't have worked. You've done the math. You are intimately familiar with the reasons — the timing, the distance, the fundamental incompatibility of two people who wanted slightly different things and were too busy being interesting at each other to say so out loud.

You know. The knowledge just sits there in your chest not doing its job, like a smoke detector with a dead battery, while the kitchen fills up with smoke and you stand there thinking, yes, I'm aware, thank you, very much aware.

Because your brain has decided the gap between what happened and what could have is ideal real estate, actually, and it has moved in with all its things.

The replay runs on a loop — a laugh that lasted a beat too long, a 2am text that meant everything or nothing depending on the hour and your general emotional stability, a moment that felt exactly like the beginning of something and then turned out to be the end of the same thing.

Your brain watches this reel with the dedication of a film student and the critical distance of absolutely none.

You played it so cool, too. That's what really gets you. Masterful. Effortless, even.

Completely unbothered by the whole situation, right up until the moment you were extremely bothered, which you expressed to no one, very successfully, and here you are.

The door closed and you're not even sure when because you were so busy looking relaxed about it being open.

So this is the thing you carry around: a small, faintly embarrassing grief for a relationship that existed mainly as a vibe and some subtext. You can't call it loss because you'd have to explain what you lost and the answer is potential, which is not a satisfying answer, which is why you don't bring it up.

You lost a hypothesis. You are mourning a feeling that was mostly speculation with good lighting.

And still the television plays.

You don't even like the show — you've said this, you've thought it, you believe it on some level.

Mediocre writing. Unresolved tension that probably would have resolved badly. You would have been disappointed by the ending. You tell yourself this with great conviction every time it comes on, and then you sit down anyway, and you listen, and you wait, and you do not turn it off.

You are waiting to find out how a cancelled show ends.

You know how cancelled shows end.

And you keep watching anyway.