I Breathe Where You Stopped

I Breathe Where You Stopped

Some days, I wake with your name curled on my tongue like morning fog — weightless, shapeless, and everywhere. It lingers in the hollows of my chest, where your laugh used to echo, where the rhythm of your voice used to rise like sunlit dust in a quiet room. You are not here. But I breathe.

And that, sometimes, is the hardest part.

I don’t know when it started — the living for you. Not just after you. There's a difference. In the beginning, I moved through the days like a marionette of grief, limbs pulled forward by duty and guilt. I ate meals you would have loved. I watched films we said we’d see. I touched the world with borrowed hands, as if I had no right to call this skin my own without you beside it.

But eventually, life came back. Not in a blaze, but in seams and silences.

A leaf fell, and I noticed the way it spun — like it couldn’t decide whether to fall or fly. A child laughed in the supermarket, and I remembered how you used to say joy sounds like a bell no one can find. I stood in the rain one day and didn’t rush inside.

That’s when I knew: I had begun to breathe where you stopped.

You stopped on an ordinary day. That’s the part that catches me still — the casual cruelty of it. The sky was neither bright nor stormy. Just... blue. As if nothing had changed. But everything had.

You always believed time was a ribbon, not a line. “We leave pieces of ourselves tied to places,” you said once. “Little knots of memory the wind can’t undo.”

So I began walking back through the places you loved. Not out of nostalgia, but out of a need to feel the weight of you tethered to this world.

The coffee shop with the crooked art. The park bench where you wrote your half-finished poems. The bookstore with creaky floorboards and an owner who still asks, “And how is she today?” before catching himself.

In each place, I left something behind for you: a folded note, a pressed flower, a whisper. I hoped the wind would carry them to whatever corner of existence you now occupy.

I began planting things.

It started with a single pot of lavender on the windowsill. You hated the smell, said it reminded you of your grandmother’s sock drawer. But I planted it anyway — out of spite, out of love, out of the simple need to watch something grow.

Then came basil. Rosemary. A tomato vine that twisted like a small, green galaxy reaching for light. Watching them rise from soil felt like rebellion. Like proof that even in your absence, things could thrive.

Sometimes, I talk to you. Not out loud — that would be too final. Instead, I speak in small movements: I stir soup the way you did, counterclockwise, always. I turn the page in a book and imagine you over my shoulder. I hum your favorite song when I’m alone in the car. These are the ways I keep the thread from snapping.

There are days, still, when the ache returns like a storm: sudden, merciless, full of noise. It takes the shape of your jacket in the closet, untouched. The sound of your favorite shoes tapping down the hall — a sound that never comes. The way the air smells in September, sharp and smoky, like the breath of endings.

But even then, I breathe.

Because someone has to. Because you would have. Because I owe the world the echo of your laughter, even if it comes out in my voice instead.

And here's the strange, soft truth I never expected: sometimes, I feel you in the joy.

Not the pain. Not the silence. But in the golden spill of afternoon sunlight on my desk. In the warm roll of thunder on a distant summer night. In the moment I close my eyes, stretch my arms wide, and let the breeze push against me like a lover’s hand.

You stopped. But I didn't.

And so now I breathe not just after you. I breathe for you.

In every exhale, I carry the shape of your absence.

And in every inhale, I fill the space you left behind — not to replace you, but to remember you with every beat of my lungs.