There is a particular loneliness in realizing that every person carries their own private universe, a constellation of sights and sounds and connections only they can chart. We walk through life presuming some overlap, assuming that what we see, others must also see, that what we feel can be understood if only we find the right words. But that’s never true, not entirely. The world you inhabit exists only in you, shaped by the peculiar tilt of your thoughts, the way you absorb light, the shadows you notice that others don’t. Each of us is, in some way, a world entire, complete unto ourselves, even as we brush against one another in the fleeting intersections of shared experience.
When someone dies, it isn’t just a person slipping out of reach. It is the quiet collapse of their world, an entire geography erased. The streets they could walk blindfolded, the moments they could replay with perfect clarity—the laughter in a specific room, the way the light hit the water on a particular afternoon—vanish with them. We speak of legacies, of memories kept alive, as though those fragments could reconstruct what was lost. But even the sharpest memory is just a sliver, a poor rendering of a reality no one else could fully see.
I think of this often when I walk through places that were once crowded with other lives. A park bench where someone once sat, lost in thought. A café where lovers quarreled or conspired or simply sat in silence, each imagining the other was seeing the same thing. When they are gone, what happens to the lives they carried with them? To the moments that mattered only to them? It is hard not to feel the weight of it, this perpetual loss we live alongside without noticing most of the time.
There is a kind of quiet brutality in it, the way the world continues on without pause, without ceremony. Someone’s world ends, but ours keeps moving, as if the loss were just a brief ripple on the surface of a deep and indifferent ocean. Their possessions are boxed up, their routines abandoned or absorbed by others, their name spoken less and less until it becomes just a faint echo. We grieve the person, of course. But we also grieve the worlds they took with them: the secrets they never shared, the memories they never spoke aloud, the perspectives they alone held.
This is what we don’t say at funerals, though we feel it in the pauses, in the way voices falter when people try to sum up a life. The stories they tell are attempts at preservation, a frantic gathering of the pieces that might hold some shape of the whole. But no one can speak for someone else’s world. It goes with them, every time, as it must. And we are left to mourn not just the person but the untranslatable enormity of what they took with them.
The weight of this understanding doesn’t always come suddenly. It grows slowly, like ivy creeping up a wall, wrapping itself around the moments we once thought were simple or ordinary. It’s in the way we begin to see our own lives not as solitary threads but as parts of an intricate, tangled web, each person’s world brushing up against another’s, shaping it, coloring it, even as it remains separate. And yet, for all this closeness, for all the love and connection and intimacy we share, the gap remains. We can only ever glimpse another’s world through the faint light they let through the cracks.
Perhaps this is why we hold on so tightly to our own memories, the ones that feel most real to us. They are the echoes of our worlds, the proof that we were here, that our way of seeing mattered, even if only to us. We photograph sunsets, write down dreams, try to etch pieces of our inner universe into something tangible, something that might outlast us. But we know, deep down, that it won’t. The photographs will fade, the words will lose their meaning to others, and what was once vivid will become faint, then disappear altogether.
And maybe that’s the quiet tragedy of being human: knowing that our worlds will end with us, and yet continuing to build them, to fill them with meaning, to love and create and fight for a world we know is impermanent. Maybe that is why we look for ways to connect, to share even the smallest pieces of what we see, hoping that in the exchange, something of us will remain. Maybe that is why, despite everything, we keep going. We build our worlds anyway. We fill them with beauty and heartbreak and the things that make us human. We live as if it matters. And maybe it does. Or maybe it doesn’t. But it’s all we have. And maybe that, too, is enough.
