Echoes of You

I don’t even know how I got here. How we got here. This place where every room feels too empty, every street too long, every laugh too sharp because it isn’t yours. I wake up and the first thought that hits me isn’t the sun or the day—it’s you. And then the absence. The nothing. The silence that fills every corner like a tide that keeps coming back no matter how hard I try to push it away. Your name used to be a whisper in the dark, soft, warm, a secret I held close like it was part of me. Now it’s just a ghost, echoing faintly, too weak to comfort me, too present to ignore.

I keep thinking about the love we had. Raw. Honest. Like fire that could burn through anything. I thought it was enough to carry us through everything. I thought it would be enough to hold you here. But it isn’t. It couldn’t. And now that love lies buried in me somewhere, tangled in threads I can’t reach, hidden under grief and regret. I find myself searching for you everywhere, in the wrong places—the stranger on the train who smiles like you did, the echo of laughter that isn’t yours, the reflection of a fleeting shadow on the wall—and for a second, I almost convince myself you are still there. But it’s always an illusion, a trick of memory, a cruel joke the universe plays on a heart that refuses to let go.

You left, and you didn’t even say goodbye. You just slipped away like a song that was once so sweet I couldn’t stop humming it, but now it drifts unheard, lost in the noise of the world. I tried to hold on. I tried so hard. I clenched my fists, I gritted my teeth, I begged the universe to give me one more moment, one more chance. But you slipped through. You always did, like light fading at dusk, like a shadow melting into nothing. And here I am, holding nothing, clutching the air where you used to be.

Your laughter stays with me. It haunts me, honestly. Sometimes I hear it when the wind moves a certain way outside my window, sometimes when cups clatter in the café down the street, sometimes when I close my eyes at night and remember. I chase it in faces I see walking past me, hoping, praying, for even a flicker of you. But it never comes. You’re gone. You were never really there at all. And yet, part of me keeps believing, keeps searching, keeps reaching for the impossibility.

The days drag on. The nights are colder than I ever remembered. I wrap myself in memories of you like fragile golden threads, and sometimes they glimmer with warmth—but only for a moment, before the chill reminds me I am alone. I reach, but there is nothing. Only absence. Only echo. Only the hollow space you left behind. And even knowing that, even feeling it every day in the pit of my chest, I wait. I don’t know what I’m waiting for. Maybe for you to come back. Maybe for the world to rewrite itself and put you back where you belong. Maybe for myself to finally stop aching. But mostly, I think I wait because I don’t know how to stop.

I carry on. I have to. Life doesn’t pause for heartbreak, no matter how heavy. But I walk through it with part of me gone, a wound that refuses to heal. Part of me lives in those moments with you—the laughter, the warmth, the softness, the honesty—and it hurts, it hurts more than I can explain, but I cling to it anyway. Every tear, every sigh, every whispered goodbye I mutter to myself is a testament. A testament to what we were. To what I lost. To the love that still lives in me, even if it hurts to remember it.

I don’t think I’ll ever let go. I don’t think I can. And maybe that’s okay. Maybe love is like that sometimes—something you carry with you, something that breaks you open and never lets go, something you learn to live with. So I write it all down, because if I don’t, it swallows me whole. Every memory, every ghost, every echo of you—I pour it onto the page. I wait. I remember. I ache. And I say goodbye again and again, quietly, softly, like a prayer to the empty air.

Even now, even here, part of me still reaches for you, still whispers your name, still hopes that maybe one day, the hollow will fill again.