How do you mourn what never existed at all?
Item #: SCP-████
Object Class: Safe Decommissioned
Special Containment Procedures: SCP-████ is not to be mourned.
Description: SCP-████ isn't how you remember it, is it?
Your first encounter with SCP-████ was by chance, a mixing of friend groups, a shifting of assigned seats in a high school class you were both hopelessly unprepared for, but did phenomenal in all the same. You never thought you would end up like this, never thought that conceptual link would form between you, leading to others believing you could be inseparable, though you wanted nothing more to be separated for a time.
But SCP-████ was kind, patient, endlessly understanding as you tried to saw and rip and free yourself from the path the two of you seemed to walk in parallel, the path that led to where you are now, the path that created you. You never understood why SCP-████ would stick around, why it still smiled at you in the hallway, or passed you notes, or why your thoughts kept collating, trying to form the full figure of something you only ever knew from the periphery. It was something you didn't want to let in, but something you could never truly escape.
Until one day you stopped fighting entirely.
You learned that SCP-████-1 was not totally unlike SCP-████, just different in the way it carried itself, and how it moved and interacted with the natural and unnatural of the world. SCP-████ clung to it like a mirage, and it was easy to imagine SCP-████-1 replaced almost entirely by it, a gilded idea to hide the reality under the surface. Maybe it could be real if you tried hard enough, if you allowed yourself to think that maybe SCP-████-1 was the illusion, or that they existed as opposites, or not at all.
But reality doesn't quite work that way, nor is it as malleable as one may wish.
Although every force has its equal and opposite reaction, the more you pushed to make SCP-████ real, and the more you pushed SCP-████-1, the less you were actually able to hold on to both. Ideas are often subject to the whims of their bearers, but the consequences are not theirs alone to hold. Eventually, something gives way, breaks, shatters into crystalline glances of the thing that refuses to look at you the way it once did, leaving a void where your heart must have been.
Like others in your situation, you may seek out these shards, try to backtrack and wind the clock to return to that much warmer time, where rose-colored glasses masked the minefield of red flags you so readily ignored.
But you won't find SCP-████ in the hallway or in the fields, won't find it next to you on the swaying swing set or the crumb-filled passenger seat of your car; all the places you would think to look will bring no respite. You will continue to dig deeper, fighting as that phantom pain grows more and more dull, as you chase the fleeting remnants in hope they may evoke something in you.
You'll convince yourself that you see SCP-████ in the negative space, all the places that it is not. But even that feeds more and more into the obsession. SCP-████ is not in the empty half of the bed, nor the chalky, cherry taste of lipstick or sweat on skin. Its voice cannot be found in the murmuring crowds, or in the missing response to the call of a bird.
SCP-████ will remain in your head, long after your first exposure, and long after SCP-████-1 itself has slowly disappeared. You'll never truly give up your search for it, even though you probably should.
Addendum 1: Decommissioning
They say time fades all wounds, and sometimes distance in the only way to heal. Sometimes, one can only truly see what they've lost when they have had the time to brine in it, the anguish and frustration of it all, before the truth makes itself known in its raw entirety.
Although SCP-████ remains as a facade, its outer layer has cracked, chipped, ultimately been sanded away by the hourglass' flow. You'll find yourself with a new perspective, wanting to try to rekindle what you thought you once had, and SCP-████-1, mercifully, will welcome you in kind.
In the ways you have been blind to change until you stepped back, SCP-████-1 was an agent of it, enjoying the cosmic dance as it sheds it leaves and dons a new hue without fear, without judgement. Its correspondence, the card stock ephemerality, allows for SCP-████ to slowly regain its form, but the texts, cards, letters, all allow for a different type of interpretation, painting SCP-████ and SCP-████-1 in a new light: two sides of the same coin, never meeting, but always there.
A slow connection, exposure, allows for the mirage to stabilize, allows for two parts swirl and dissolve and become whole. SCP-████ will not try to fight this; it lacks the capability to do so, allowing itself instead to slowly fade away without a word as the sun pierces through the morning fog and dew and illuminates the true world.
SCP-████-1 is kind, patient, understanding in the way that it too has experienced this before, and there is little shame in something so natural. It, though bound to SCP-████, is an anchor to the reality of the situation, to the opulent exterior of a ship with a hollow interior, a forever draining project to sand and paint and fight the rust so the prize is made somehow more worth it.
But the ship does not regard its anchor, and what fairness is there in binding another to an impossibly maintained dream?
It's time to wake up and finally face what that means.
Sometimes you think about SCP-████, that latched onto you so long ago, and miss the faux security that it gave you, miss being Laelaps in that Teumessian chase that never seemed to get closer no matter how hard you pushed yourself towards it.
Sometimes you think about SCP-████-1, who had to endure for so long under false pretenses, existing in a twisted context where the idea of it somehow became fact, and how what was truly there wasn't appreciated until you removed your blinders and allowed yourself to see.
Sometimes the only way to move forward is to kill the idea of something that never existed at all…
And only then will SCP-████-1 be free.
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