How to miss you silently

Please don't turn the pages at dusk and let the coffee frost brown on the rim of your cup.

Stop pretending to read and staring helplessly at the light on the page

Don't walk down that familiar path lined with sycamore trees anymore

When missing someone, there should be a hint of dissatisfaction and bitterness.

Don't go through your mobile phone, photo albums and chat records, don't drink and cry afterward, don't listen to sad and melodramatic songs, don't get a pet because of this person, and don't plant a tree for this person with your own hands. The most luxurious way to miss someone is to do nothing and miss you like a primitive person.

The oven in the bakery downstairs is roaring again, and the sweet, creamy aroma spreads across the windowsill. I remembered you saying that freshly baked baguettes should be dipped in honey. I bought two, but froze the moment I tore open the crispy shell. It turns out that when you share food without the person on the other side, even chewing becomes a mechanical action.

I’ve become diligent and reliable, eating breakfast on time every morning, keeping track of vegetable prices, and never arriving late to work.

I also became more patient, started running and working out, learned yoga and Pilates, and by autumn, I will have a beautiful waistline—a byproduct of missing you.

I really miss you so much that I can’t bear to think about it anymore, so I started entrusting the things around me to miss you. Sometimes I see the cup you left in the wine cabinet, and I decide to have it miss you; sometimes I see the street sign you leaned against, and I decide to have it miss you. But in the end, I still miss you, and they just can’t do it.

Even mobile phone photo albums secretly reveal things about your heart. I deleted the group photos, but I always found bits and pieces automatically backed up by the system when I cleared the cache - your eyelashes hanging down, the corners of your coat blown by the wind, and the side view of you holding a glass of wine at a certain party. They were like fireflies hiding in the dark, stinging my eyes every time they lit up. I had to lie to myself that they were just expired pixels, like the remnants of snow that refused to retire at the end of a spring curtain call.

They say thoughts are a tsunami that no one knows about, but it forms a silent rain in my heart.

You seem to be everywhere, yet you are nowhere to be found.

So, on every seemingly ordinary morning, as I pass by familiar streets, or when your favorite song suddenly plays in my headphones, I write a letter with my breath—a letter that will never be sent. It contains no fiery words, only the warmth of the wind brushing past my hair, and the curve of your skirt as you turned away one twilight.

Longing grows wild in my heart, turning into a wasteland, yet when others ask, I only smile and say, “The weather is truly beautiful today.”