the quiet tragedy of an unshared grocery list

we were almost something beautiful and boring

A week ago I was deep cleaning my my room and came across our grocery list from 7 months ago.

JIA & THEO GROCERIES: 9/2/24 (day before your birthday!!)

- carton of goldfish
- protein shakes
- eggo chocolate chip waffles
- eggs
- tres leches cake
- immunity shots (x7)
- protein powder 
- low-fat blueberry muffins
- pasta
- marinara sauce
- cinnamon
- lucky charms

I stared at the list. Just stared. As I glossed over each item on the list, I recovered a memory of you, my heart cracked, full with longing and hurt.

And I was furious. Furious because I thought I was over it.

I thought getting rid of the gifted roses, the scent of you in my house, the photos of our dates—that all of it would be enough. That I could cleanse you from the corners of my life.

But no. It was the stupid grocery list that suspended time while I was stuck in memories of our past. Something so small, so ordinary. I hated that it still mattered. I was upset that something so meaningless impacted me so much.

I realized how how love, when it’s real, doesn’t just live in big gestures or grand declarations—it lives in grocery lists.

In knowing what muffins you liked.
The brand of protein shake that didn’t upset your stomach.
The cake you wanted the night before your birthday.

You were in everything.

I ran down to the kitchen to look at the list I had made a couple days ago.

Groceries

- carton of goldfish
- lucky charms
- pasta
- immunity shots (x7)
- parsley
- cinnamon

I juxtapose the two, and in comparing them, I felt it—the quiet grief that lives in absence. How the missing items feel like mourning. It’s not just that you’re gone. The rhythm of us—all the decisions made in tandem, the way we coexisted—has unraveled into something solo. And that’s the hardest part.

We were almost something beautiful and boring.

We had built rituals out of routine—mid-day breakfasts, midnight snacks, the hum of life lived together. Now all of that is gone.

I slide down the wall facing the fridge and let the melancholy seep into every part of my soul. You will never know the extent to which this affects me.

You will never know that whenever I see someone with the same stupidly shaped, obscenely heavy water bottle, I am reminded of you. You will never understand the way my heart drops when I see a car that looks like yours. You will never know how sometimes I cry myself to sleep thinking about the way you saw, touched, loved me.

I have future nostalgia for a life I will forever miss but never experience.

Our ordinary lives that we could have lived like sacred rituals. Our early mornings hiding under the covers while the sun shines on our faces through the windows, illuminating the room. Our nights cuddled together where words escaped us, but we both knew what the other was saying anyway.

I dream of folding your shirts in a life that let me. I crave seeing the look of love on your face when you come home from work and see me waiting there for you. I miss the dances we’ll never have under dim kitchen lighting to 90s love songs. I miss all the inside jokes we’ll never make, the arguments we’ll never grow from, the stupid traditions we’ll never invent.

Love lived in the silly little things like our groceries. In our exact, perfected ratio of sauce to pasta. It lived in the way we collaborated on putting the fitted sheet on the bed, turning frustration into laughter. In how I never had to ask—you just knew. When I needed silence, or tea, or to be held.

It wasn’t perfect. But it was real. It was ours.

And it’s all gone.

Tears well in my eyes.

Sometimes I wonder if you ever think about me when you walk through the cereal aisle. If you hesitate at the goldfish. If you think of me when you see cinnamon because you know I put it on everything.

I wonder if your lists look different now too—if someone else’s preferences have taken my place. I don’t know what hurts more: the idea that they have, or the idea that they haven’t.

But I know this much: You were loved here.
In this home. In this heart.
In a thousand tiny, unremarkable ways that made up something extraordinary.

And maybe love, when it’s real, doesn’t need to end with closure or clarity.
Maybe it just ends with the protein powder you never finished hidden at the back of the cabinet, the pasta recipe we perfected that I still use, and a girl crouched beside her fridge, learning to grieve in lowercase.
Maybe it ends by continuing—not in presence, but in memory.
Not in the lists we make together, but in the quiet edits we make alone.

I stand up eventually. My legs stiff, my head aching from the tears.
I wipe my cheeks. I take a deep breath.

And I go back to my day—
grocery list still on the fridge,
heart still a little heavy, but surviving.

Because love doesn’t leave. It lingers.

In goldfish. In cinnamon. In all the lives we almost lived.

In some version of us, somewhere, I got to do laundry and taxes with you—and I loved every second of it. We have the shared calendar apps. We smile at the clutter that slowly accumulates in the living room. I would’ve liked making a home in the details, finding joy in the errands, love in the spreadsheets, grace in the chores.

We would’ve made magic out of the mundane.
But instead, I carry it all with me—quietly, tenderly—not to forget, but to remember that it mattered.

That you mattered.