You Are Not on the Pages of My Thoughts, There Are Only Wounds

I used to write about you. On scraps of paper, on napkins, in the back of my notebooks—everywhere. You were there, inked in a thousand different ways. Every word, every sentence I wrote seemed to carry the weight of you. It was like the only way I could breathe was to bring you into existence over and over again, to make sense of something that never quite made sense in my life.

I wanted to capture your essence, make you real in a way that would fill the void. Every time I wrote your name, I thought I was erasing the distance between us. But the truth was, I was only creating more of it. Each letter was a new fracture, a new tear in a fabric that was already falling apart. And with every word, I bled.

There was a time when I thought of you constantly. Your smile, the way your eyes would light up when you spoke of things that mattered to you, the way your hands would move when you were passionate. I thought of the way you said my name, the warmth in your voice that could have melted any cold that lingered in the world.

I thought about these things so much, they became more than just thoughts. They became memories—though they were not mine. You never gave me those moments, but I clung to them as though they were treasures. I built stories around them, stories of us, of what could have been, of what I imagined we could be.

But now, there’s nothing left. No words. No stories. Only the empty spaces where you used to live.

You are not on the pages of my thoughts anymore. You’ve faded, evaporated into the ink of what used to be. Instead, there are only wounds. There are jagged edges of what’s been left behind. You were a dream that fractured, a vision that shattered. And now, you’re nothing more than a scar that refuses to heal.

I thought I could hold on to you through the words I wrote. I thought that if I could just keep writing, I would somehow rewrite reality, bend it into something that made sense. But the more I wrote, the more I realized that I was only bleeding. Each story I crafted was a kind of self-inflicted wound, a desperate attempt to rewrite what was broken.

And then I stopped writing.

It wasn’t a conscious decision. It was just one day when I found the pen in my hand and couldn’t bring myself to make the first mark on the page. It was as though the weight of your absence had become too much to bear, as though each word that once carried you forward was now a dagger, a reminder of everything that could never be. The stories I had written before were like ghosts haunting the pages—silent, empty, and cold.

I lied when I said it was better this way. I called it 'letting go,' but really, I was burying the evidence. If I stopped writing about you, maybe I could pretend none of it happened—the wanting, the dreaming, the way I built cathedrals from your half-smiles.

But how do you unlearn a religion? How do you scrub away a stain that only you can see?

I never told you about the worlds I made for us. Cities where we spoke in sonnets, deserts where we drank moonlight. You were always the hero; I was the narrator, whispering your story into the dark. Maybe I kept quiet because I knew the truth: heroes don’t stay for the ones who write them.

Funny, isn’t it? To haunt someone’s imagination so completely, yet never earn a footnote in their actual life. You were my epic. I was your typo.

I waited—not for you, but for an alchemy of chance and courage. For time to reverse, for my words to become spells, for the crack in us to heal into a scar worth keeping.

It didn’t. The silence grew thorns. The unwritten pages fermented into something bitter. I bled myself dry trying to revise a story you never even read.

Then one day, I burned the metaphors. Let the ash of what-if and almost scatter. You don’t haunt my sentences anymore—just the spaces between them. A punctuation mark. A breath held too long.

The scars? They’re not stories anymore. Just geography. Proof I survived the landslide of my own making.

Do you think of me? Not the me you knew—the quiet girl who mistook your small talk for scripture—but the me who outgrew you? The one who stopped waiting for the universe to apologize?

Doesn’t matter. We weren’t a love story. Just two mismatched verbs clinging to the same blank page.

Now, the page is full.

And I’m done writing in the margins.

I could say that I’m bitter about it, that I’m angry for the years I wasted writing stories that weren’t true, for the time I spent waiting for something that would never come. But I’m not. I’m not angry anymore. I’m not hurt anymore.

I am, however, tired. Tired of the stories I created in my head. Tired of the wounds that never fully healed. Tired of the illusion that something could be different, that you could ever have been more than a figment of my imagination.

I don’t need to write about you anymore. I don’t need to carry your name in the spaces between words. Because I have learned, finally, that I don’t need you to define me. I don’t need you to fill the gaps in my story.

You are not on the pages of my thoughts anymore. And perhaps that is the greatest gift I can give myself.

I can live without you now. I can be whole without you now.

The wounds, though they are still there, are no longer open. They are healing. Slowly.

And one day, they will be scars.