The first time Ariah re-read her story, she winced.
Not because it was poorly written, but because it still felt too centered on him. As if every ache, every metaphor, every revelation rotated around the gravity of his absence.
She hadn't meant for it to be that way. She thought she was writing herself free.
But there he was, in the margins, between the lines, like a ghost with editing rights.
So she started again.
Same story.
New voice.
This time, in third person.
No, I.
No, he.
Just:
A girl once learned how to disappear in plain sight. But this is not a story about him. It's a story about how she came back to life.
And it changed everything.
Writing in third person gave her distance.
She could see herself with more kindness, less judgment.
She became the witness, not the wound. The historian, not the hostage.
The story stopped being about survival.
It started becoming a lens, a way to trace how far she'd come, how deeply she'd grown.
She noticed things she hadn't before.
The way she watered her plants after a hard day.
The way her voice steadied when reading her writing out loud.
The way joy quietly returned like an old friend who didn't need explanations.
He wasn't in those parts.
He never had been.
She stopped calling it the situationship story.
She started calling it the survival story.
And for the first time, she wasn't writing to make sense of him.
She was writing to make sense of herself.
There was a shift in her journaling too.
The pages no longer held what-ifs or fake conversations.
Instead, they were filled with questions she was finally curious enough to ask:
What does freedom look like in practice?
When did I begin to shrink?
What would it mean to take up space, loudly?
She didn't have all the answers.
But she had a pen.
And for now, that was enough.
By the end of that week, she closed her notebook and whispered:
Not everything was about him.
And for the first time in months, she believed it.
She started playing a game with herself.
Every time she felt the urge to mention his name in her writing, she would substitute it with something else:
A moment of self-clarity.
A memory of laughter with Nia.
A fragment of a poem she wrote at sixteen.
The first time she stood up for herself, even if her voice trembled.
She wasn't erasing him.
She was re-centering the story.
Reclaiming authorship.
There was so much of her life untouched by his presence, so many joys that had existed long before he ever entered the picture. She began revisiting them. Watching old family videos. Re-reading her childhood diaries. One entry from her teenage years read:
I want to be a writer who tells the truth.
She smiled. That girl still lived inside her.
At night, she lit a candle and played soft jazz as she wrote. Not about heartbreak, but about wonder, quiet strength, and the art of choosing oneself. Sometimes, she wrote dialogue between past and present versions of herself.
Sometimes, she let the silence do the talking.