The first Christmas after my divorce. From the marriage I kept a laptop, some clothes, and a bicycle. Taking anything else would have meant putting a price on ten years, and I couldn't do that. My parents had moved out of town and I couldn't reach them, so I had lunch at my grandma's. It ended early. It was freezing outside, so the bike wasn't an option. I took the bus home.

It was around five in the evening. The streets were quiet. The bus was completely empty. I sat there for forty minutes, the only passenger, watching the city slide past without any sense of urgency.

I wasn't heartbroken. I didn't feel loss. That confused me at the time.

Only later did I understand why. I'd never really felt love in that relationship. It had felt practical, calm, easy to explain. A structure that looked stable from the outside and asked very little from me on the inside. We'd spent years maintaining something that neither of us had the honesty to question.

The marriage had ended long before the paperwork. That Christmas was when the emptiness stopped arguing with me.

The feeling on that bus wasn't grief. It was recognition. When something collapses and the dominant feeling is confusion instead of sadness, that's information. It means the loss happened earlier and quieter than the event.

That emptiness felt permanent. Not dramatic, not overwhelming. Just flat. Like a new baseline I'd have to accept. At the time I believed that was the final state. That some choices lead to an after that doesn't improve. That some endings simply reduce you.

Here's what I didn't understand on that bus. Your mind treats the current emotional state as a forecast. Whatever you're feeling right now, it projects forward as the permanent condition. Sitting in that empty bus on Christmas evening, my brain concluded: this is what your life is now. Alone, hollow, reduced. It felt like truth. It was actually just a feeling doing an impression of truth.

That's the mechanism. Emotions don't present themselves as temporary. They present themselves as verdicts. "You failed." "This is permanent." "You'll feel this way from now on." And because the feeling is real, the verdict feels real too. You stop questioning it because questioning a feeling you're inside of feels like denial.

It's not denial. It's just remembering that feelings are weather, not geography. They pass through. They don't define the terrain.

The loneliness didn't disappear because I reframed it. The fear didn't fade because I learned a lesson. It faded because life kept moving without consulting my interpretation of it. The bus kept driving. Days passed. Other things demanded attention. Not better things, just different ones. Hard days still came. They just stopped feeling like a verdict. They became events instead of conclusions.

The empty bus on Christmas felt like proof that I'd failed at something fundamental. It wasn't. It was one evening, in one year, on one route through a quiet city. It felt enormous while I was sitting in it. It got smaller as I kept moving. Not because I understood it better. Because I stopped letting it decide what came next.

The move I use now when a feeling starts acting like a verdict is embarrassingly simple. I ask: "Is this a fact or is this today?" A bad meeting, a rejection, a night where everything feels pointless. Is this the new reality, or is this Tuesday? Almost every time, it's Tuesday. The feeling is real. The conclusion it's selling me isn't.

It doesn't make the feeling lighter. But it stops me from building a life around a mood.