Psychology has names for this. Repetition. Secondary gain. Familiar distress. The language is accurate but bloodless. It doesn’t capture the aesthetic pleasure of melancholy well-worn, the satisfaction of being able to say this is why I am like this. It doesn’t account for how seductive it can feel to remain loyal to a wound rather than risk a future that does not recognise you.

Uncertainty is far more destabilising than grief.

Grief at least has contours. It gives the day a tone. You wake up knowing how you will feel. There is grim relief in that. You do not have to negotiate with possibility. You do not have to revise the self.

I used to wake up already tired, the fatigue arriving in advance of the day itself, carried by the certainty of how it would unfold. Memory before tea. Longing before noon. Silence dressed up as depth.

This is especially potent in love. Romantic suffering has an almost unmatched capacity to dignify stagnation. The unfinished relationship. The almost-love. The person who left without closure. These become emotional reliquaries. You revisit them to preserve a certain internal temperature. A sort of ache that reassures you you are still alive, still capable of intensity, still someone to whom something extraordinary once happened.