Miss each other

There are days when your name moves through me like a wind that never learned how to stop, a current that finds every hollow inside my chest and turns it into an echo chamber. I don’t call for you, yet you arrive—uninvited, unannounced—like a shadow that’s memorized the shape of my steps. I no longer know whether what I feel is remembrance or habit, longing or inertia; all I know is that it hurts in ways I cannot name without breaking something inside myself.

I think of you in the hours when the light is thin and the world seems unsure of itself, when everything slows just enough for memory to seep through the cracks I try to seal. In those instants, your absence becomes a presence—sharp, undeniable, almost physical. It sits beside me, breathes with me, looks at me with the version of your eyes my mind refuses to let go of. And though you are nowhere near, I instinctively shift as if you might reach out to touch my shoulder the way you once did, lightly, almost absentmindedly, as though the gesture cost you nothing and gave me everything.

There are things I never told you, not because I didn’t trust you, but because I didn’t trust myself to survive your silence if you chose not to answer. So I swallowed my truths, hoping they would diminish; instead, they grew heavy, like stones I now carry everywhere. Sometimes I speak them aloud when the room is dark enough that I can pretend you might hear me, but even then the words seem to dissolve before they reach the air, as if they know they no longer have a destination.

I’m afraid of forgetting you.

And I’m afraid of remembering you.

Both terrify me in different ways.

Sometimes I imagine a future in which your face becomes blurred, softened by time until I can no longer recall the exact curve of your mouth when you tried not to smile, or the way your voice dipped when you were tired. That thought crushes me. But so does the idea that I might never stop holding on to the ghost of you, that I might spend years living inside a memory that is no longer alive, no longer ours.

I tell myself to let go, and I try—I swear I try—but the moment I loosen my grip, something inside me collapses, as if your memory were the last beam holding up a house already half-ruined. I collapse with it. I fall into the emptiness you left behind, an emptiness I keep trying to patch with words, with silence, with anything that might numb the ache long enough for me to pretend I’m healing.

At night, I find myself speaking to the darkness as though it might carry my voice to you, as though some fragment of you might still be listening somewhere I cannot reach. I know how foolish it is, how desperate it sounds even to myself, but the alternative—the quiet acceptance that you will never hear me again—feels unbearable. So I keep talking. I keep hoping. I keep breaking in ways no one else can see.

There are days I wake up convinced I’ve finally begun to move on, that I have placed enough distance between us for the wound to close. But then something small—a scent, a word, the slant of the light on a wall—undoes me completely, dragging me back into the gravity of what we once were, or what I wished we could have been. It only takes a second for your absence to fill the room again, as though it had been waiting just outside the door for the smallest invitation.

The worst part is knowing that you will not return. Not because you cannot, but because you will not. That is a truth I never learned how to carry without feeling it fracture me from the inside. I knock on a door that no longer exists, whisper words that no longer have meaning, and hold a space inside my chest shaped exactly like you—even though you are gone, even though you chose to be.

I want to stop loving you.

I want to reclaim the parts of myself that I gave to you so easily, so foolishly, without asking what you were willing to give in return.

I want to close the window you keep slipping through like a winter that refuses to end.

But you have become a wound that breathes,

a room that collapsed long ago

and yet somehow continues to call me back,

the only place where I know how to cry,

how to break,

how to still feel human.

And so I kneel before this brutal truth:

I have lost you forever,

and still I love you

like a castaway who clutches water

believing it is still the sea.