The Person You’ve Never Met but Miss Every Day

The Person You’ve Never Met but Miss Every Day

I don’t know her name.

I don’t know what color her eyes were, what her laugh sounded like, or the shape of her hands. I don’t know if she loved thunderstorms or was afraid of them, if she hummed while she cooked, or if she bit her nails when she was nervous.

But I miss her every single day.

I suppose it sounds strange — missing someone you’ve never met. People tend to grieve tangible things: lost lovers, faded friendships, the sudden absence of a voice on the other end of a phone line. But how do you explain the ache for someone whose face you’ve never seen outside of a fading, yellowed photograph, or a stranger from a dream that returns like a tide you can’t fight off?

The person I miss is my mother’s twin sister, Lila.

She died when they were barely two years old. A fever, a misdiagnosis, a doctor who arrived too late. My grandmother never spoke of it. My mother, for most of my childhood, wouldn’t either. It was a history we buried in the soft soil of family silence, as if not speaking her name would lessen the weight of her absence.

But there were hints.

A locket I wasn’t allowed to touch. An empty seat at every birthday dinner my mother hosted for herself, always saying she was saving it for “luck.” A box in the attic marked “L” in my grandmother’s careful cursive, filled with tiny shoes and a single lock of hair tied with a pink ribbon.

It wasn’t until I was sixteen that I truly learned her name. My mother, after one too many glasses of wine, confessed it like a sin.

“Lila,” she whispered, her voice thick with unshed tears. “I still feel her, you know. Like a shadow, like a missing half of myself. Some days I swear I see her in the mirror.”

I started dreaming of her after that.

In my dreams, Lila was always standing by the ocean, her hair lifted by the wind, her back to me. She never spoke, never turned around. But I knew it was her. I could feel it in the marrow of my bones — a sense of knowing, of connection so fierce it made my heart ache.

I’d wake up gasping, my hand reaching out to a space already empty.

I tried to rationalize it. I told myself it was guilt, or my mother’s grief seeping into my subconscious. But the ache didn’t leave. If anything, it grew louder.

It showed up in peculiar ways.

I’d feel an emptiness when sitting alone in cafés, as if waiting for someone I couldn’t name. I’d catch a glimpse of a stranger’s face on a crowded street and for a split second, be struck by a familiarity that made no sense. Certain old songs I’d never heard before would make me weep as if they carried someone else’s memory in their melody.

I miss her in the quiet moments. When the world slows, and the noise dies down. When I catch my reflection and wonder if my nose is shaped like hers, or if we would’ve shared the same crooked smile. I miss the conversations we’ll never have — the late-night talks, the shared secrets, the fights over borrowed clothes and stolen crushes.

I miss the version of myself that might’ve existed with her in my life.

Grief, I’ve learned, is not always about loss. Sometimes it’s about absence — the echo of a life that never had a chance to become. And in some strange, stubborn corner of my heart, I believe we’re still connected. Some ties, no matter how frayed, never fully snap.

Maybe it’s foolish. Maybe it’s just the way the mind tries to stitch up holes the universe leaves behind. But every time I see the ocean, I look for her. Every time the wind carries a certain kind of salt and dusk light, I wait.

I’ll probably never stop.

Some loves don’t require introductions. Some losses aren’t bound by logic. I don’t know who she would’ve become, or who I might’ve been with her. But I miss her anyway.

Every day.

And somehow, even in her absence, she remains one of the most real people in my world.