Unwritten Goodbyes

The train station wasn’t crowded that day.

It was the kind of quiet that clung to your skin, like humidity before a storm. I stood on the platform with a coffee in one hand and my heart wrapped tightly in the other, watching strangers drift past in slow motion. Their faces were empty. Their destinations unknown.

But I wasn’t waiting for a train.

I was remembering one.

Two years ago, she boarded the 6:45 without turning back.

Not because she was cruel.
Not because she wanted to leave.
But because life pulled her somewhere I couldn’t follow.


---

Her name was Lena.

And she was the kind of person you didn’t meet—you collided with.

She had a voice like velvet scraped across gravel,
eyes that burned like dusk over a dying fire,
and a laugh that came in two parts:
a soft inhale, then an eruption.

I met her during autumn,
when the trees were shedding things they no longer needed.
She told me she liked people the way she liked books—
a little worn, a little bruised, but full of stories waiting to be told.

I was quiet, cautious.
She was wildfire and wind chimes.
Somehow, we fit.


---

We didn’t fall in love in a single moment.
There wasn’t a first kiss under rain,
or fireworks above a skyline.
It happened slowly.
In the way I memorized the tilt of her head when she was thinking.
In the way she would hum songs she never finished.
In the way we shared silence like it was sacred.

We lived in the spaces between noise.
Reading. Writing.
Making pancakes at midnight.
Dreaming aloud with cracked voices.

She used to talk about leaving,
but only like a painter talks about a blank canvas—
with fear and hunger.

One night, she whispered,
“I don’t belong here. I never have.”
And I held her tighter,
like arms could build a home.


---

The morning she left, there were no goodbyes.

She kissed my cheek like she always did—
half-asleep and barefoot in the kitchen.
Said she was going for a walk.

She never came back.

There was no note.
No explanation.
Only a suitcase missing
and a message on my phone three days later that said:

“Please don’t look for me. I had to go.”

That was it.
That was the end.

Only, it didn’t feel like an end.
It felt like a pause.
Like she’d return any second to finish her sentence.

But she didn’t.


---

People grieve differently.

Some scream.
Some drink.
Some forget.

I archived her.
In every photograph.
In every playlist we made.
In the cup she used for tea, still sitting in the cupboard.

I didn’t erase her.
I couldn’t.

Because how do you delete someone
who disappeared
instead of departing?


---

Over time, people stopped asking about her.

Friends assumed she’d broken my heart and moved on.
My mother asked if she’d died.

But death would’ve been easier.
With death, there are rituals.
Closure.
Cemeteries and sympathy cards.

But with an unwritten goodbye—
there is only silence.
Only the echo of footsteps you thought you’d always walk beside.


---

A year passed.
Then another.

The seasons didn’t wait.
The world didn’t pause.
But inside me,
something did.

I stopped writing.
Stopped dreaming.

Until one night, while cleaning, I found a box under my bed.
In it were old letters from Lena—
poems she never published,
sketches of places she said she wanted to visit,
a photo of us at the train station, smiling like we believed time was on our side.

On the back of that photo, she’d written:
“Some people are destinations. Others are journeys.
You were both.”

I wept.

Not because she was gone.
But because I finally understood.


---

Sometimes, love isn’t meant to last forever.
Sometimes, it’s meant to change you.

Lena didn’t leave because she stopped loving me.
She left because she needed to find the parts of herself she’d buried.

She was never mine to keep.
She was a comet—
beautiful, brief,
and impossible to hold.


---

These days, I still visit that train station.
Not to wait.
Not to hope.
But to remember.

I sit on the same bench,
sip coffee from the same crooked café,
and watch the trains come and go.

I’ve learned to smile at departures now.

Because not every goodbye is spoken.
Some hang in the air like unfinished songs.

And maybe…
just maybe…

the most meaningful goodbyes
are the ones that remain unwritten.