And there had been nothing real to lose.

The man I mourned briefly, in those first days, had never existed — he was a performance, a mask worn over a hollow, and you cannot grieve a mask, because a mask was never alive to begin with.

What I felt instead, once the clarity settled, was closer to the feeling of waking from a long, elaborate dream and realizing the person you’d loved in it had never been in the room.

There was loss in it, yes, but it was the loss of an illusion, not of a person, and an illusion, once you see through it, does not leave a wound so much as an absence where you’d been told a wound would be.