Seven Years, Fifty Days, and One Last Goodbye

Fifty days.

Not nearly enough,

and somehow,

far too much.

I still remember how it began—

picking you up at LA Union Station,

the sun low, the city humming its asphalt lullaby,

your bag slung casual as a promise that had long expired,

that smile I’d folded into memory

like a train ticket kept until the ink faded.

Seven years ago,

you were a student at UC Irvine studying urban decay,

and we’d shared a brief, bright story—

too short to become something more than parallel lines.

When you returned overseas,

the distance grew teeth,

gnawing through calls stuttered across time zones,

through letters that arrived smelling of foreign postmarks,

until all that remained

was the ghost of a dial tone and Polaroids curling at the edges.

This time, when you came back to California on a corporate visa,

I thought—maybe.

Maybe there was still a page left,

dog-eared but unread in life’s library of almosts.

We stayed in your Orchid Hill apartment,

where the breeze hummed through cracked windows

like a drunk violinist’s sea,

its sigh restless twenty miles west.

The doorframe shrugged loose every Thursday,

locks clinging like secrets we named stubborn,

and we pretended not to hear

the walls whisper through paint:

This is not a beginning.

This is a museum of almosts

ticketed with what-ifs.

You cooked curry one night,

the cumin sharp as the silence

between your Tokyo flight and my Phoenix layover,

laughing as garlic burned black—

a sound I’d forgotten could exist outside the museum of us.

I fumbled with knives, with colanders,

my hands all thumbs and apologies from seven years ago,

while you said nothing,

but the steam wrote your judgment

in fog on the glass where your fingertip drew a sad emoji.

Fifty days.

Of confession drowned by subway screech at 7:15pm,

of mornings measured in coffee rings on Ikea coasters,

of walks where streetlights stretched our shadows

into futures with different ZIP codes

we’d never own.

Tiffany.

Your name still cracks me open—

a window flung wide in April,

all pollen and storm and the hum of HVAC units.

We peeled back the years

like layers of paint in a gentrified loft,

until we hit the rot beneath where termites of time feasted.

No more mysteries, just

the quiet violence of knowing:

how you still bite your nails when you lie about loving LA,

how I trace exit signs with my eyes

during silences that smell of Trader Joe’s lilies.

Fifty days,

and we understood

what the broken locks already knew—

some doors aren’t meant to stay closed,

nor to be entered twice without leaving new scratches.

This time,

we let go

not with fire,

but with the slow dissolve of dusk over JWA runway lights,

carrying love like a vase

cracked mid-shipment,

its barcode still clinging

to someone else’s dream of home.

(Some stories aren't meant to be rewritten — only remembered. Folded into the quieter corners of us, where they hum, soft and persistent. If you've ever loved someone across years, cities, and different versions of yourself, I'd be honored if you shared your story too. Or just let this one sit with you — like a train fading into the dark.)