You are capable of remembering people who no longer exist and imagining people who have not been born.

Your mind holds people who are gone, in enough detail that you know what they would say about this, and it can also construct people who do not yet exist and probably never will. Both directions in time are open to it. That a physical process in the present can contain the dead and the unborn is not made less strange by being ordinary.

When you are missing someone, let the fact that you can still hear them be a real thing rather than only a painful one. It is not the same as their presence and it is not nothing. Carrying people is one of the genuine capacities you have.