The Future She Never Got To Meet

Yesterday I bought an air fryer. Yes, I realise I'm approximately seven years behind everyone else. But apparently I have now arrived.

And, oh my God, I love it. I made chips and prawns, then I made a roast chicken with stuffing, and I swear it was the best roast chicken I've ever made. I was ridiculously pleased with myself. And almost immediately I thought:

Kahlia would have loved this.

Roast chicken, stuffing and gravy was one of her favourites. She would have been just as excited as I was. We would have started talking about all the things we could cook in it. We would have Googled recipes, bought ingredients we didn't need, tried something completely ridiculous. Probably burnt something eventually, and laughed.

It sounds like such a small thing. An air fryer. But grief has a way of finding the enormous inside the ordinary. Because suddenly I wasn't thinking about dinner anymore, I was thinking about the future, and all the things Kahlia will never know.

That's something I wasn't prepared for when she died, I knew I would miss the past, of course I would.

The birthdays.

The holidays.

The conversations.

The ordinary days.

All those thousands of moments that made up our life together. What I didn't understand was that I would also have to grieve things that hadn't even happened yet.

The world keeps changing.

New things are invented.

New songs are released.

New places open.

People come into my life she never met.

Things happen in our family she doesn't know about.

I change.

The people she loved change.

The world she knew keeps quietly becoming a world she never knew, and I find that terrifying. Because how far can the world move before it feels like we're living somewhere she never existed? I think that's part of what frightens me about the future, it's not only that I have to live it without her. It's that with every passing year, more of my life will belong to a time in which Kahlia wasn't physically here. That feels enormous.

At first, almost everything around you belongs to them.

Their clothes are still there.

Their messages are on your phone.

The food in the cupboard was bought while they were alive.

People ask about them.

Their toothbrush is where they left it.

The world still looks like the world they inhabited.

But slowly, almost imperceptibly, things change. Things get replaced, rooms change, phones change, cars change, people move, restaurants close, new ones open, technology marches relentlessly onwards. Apparently even I eventually buy an air fryer. And the world accumulates things they never touched, never saw, never knew.

There's something profoundly lonely about that, because I don't only miss Kahlia. I miss Kahlia experiencing things with me. That's different. I miss knowing exactly who I would message, I miss telling her something ridiculous, I miss her reaction, I miss someone getting disproportionately excited with me about something completely unimportant, I miss the shorthand, the laughter, the silliness, the you have to try this, the tiny shared experiences that nobody photographs because you assume there will be millions more of them.

Maybe that's one of the least understood losses in grief. You don't just lose a person, you lose their response to the rest of your life. There are things I will never know now.

What would Kahlia have thought of this?

Would she have loved that song?

What would she have ordered?

Would she have laughed?

Would she have hated it?

What would she have said about the person I've become?

And, apparently:

What would she have cooked in my bloody air fryer?

These aren't important questions, and somehow they are enormously important questions. Because a relationship is made from millions of tiny responses, not just the declarations of love or the milestone photographs.

It's:

Look at this.

Try this.

Listen to this.

You'll love this.

Guess what happened.

You're not going to believe what I just did.

That was life, and now there are moments when something happens and my mind still automatically reaches for her.

Kahls would love this.

For a second, she's right there, not as a memory. As part of the conversation. And then comes the other thought.

But she'll never know.

That's the one that hurts.

There is a phrase we use a lot in grief: moving forward. I've never particularly liked it, because forward is precisely where she isn't. The further forward I go, the more experiences I accumulate that she wasn't here for. Sometimes that makes the future feel less like possibility and more like distance. Another year, another change, another thing I can't tell her, another part of my life she didn't get to see. And perhaps that's why something as ridiculous as cooking a chicken can suddenly break your heart. Because grief doesn't wait politely for anniversaries.

It lives in kitchens.

In supermarkets.

In new songs.

In stupid jokes.

In appliances you are embarrassingly late to discover.

It appears whenever life offers you something new and your first instinct is still to turn towards someone who isn't there. I don't know how to make peace with that yet, maybe I never will. I don't want a future that steadily leaves Kahlia behind. So, perhaps part of living it is finding ways to bring her with me. Not pretending she's physically here, not convincing myself she knows about every new thing that happens. I don't know what happens after death, I wish I did. But I can keep making room for her.

I can cook the roast chicken and think about how much she would have loved it.

I can laugh at how ridiculously excited we would have become.

I can imagine the experiments.

I can say her name.

I can tell the story.

Maybe that's one way love refuses the distance.

The world is going to keep changing, that's what worlds do, and I am going to keep changing too. There will be things in my life ten years from now that I can't even imagine today. And yes, that scares me, because I want Kahlia in those years. I don't want my memories of her to belong to some increasingly distant version of the world. I want new memories, new conversations, new ridiculous little obsessions. I want to hear what she thinks, I want her to grow alongside me, and I can't have that. There isn't a beautiful sentence that makes that okay, but yesterday, standing in my kitchen ridiculously pleased with a roast chicken, I realised something else.

The future might contain things Kahlia never knew, but it will also contain me knowing Kahlia.

Her favourite foods.

Her laugh.

The things that would have excited her.

The things she'd have rolled her eyes at.

The person she was.

The person I loved.

The world will change, it already has, but wherever I go in it, there will still be moments when I look at something completely ordinary and know, instantly:

Kahls would have loved this.

And maybe that's how I take her into a future she never got to meet.