I can't recall the moment I began writing to you without expecting you to ever read these words.
Perhaps it was the day I realized that letters aren't always meant to be sent—
sometimes they exist only to pour oneself out.
And with each line I leave here,
I drain a little more of you from me.
It has been a long while since I last wrote about *us*.
Maybe because doing so is a way of reopening the wound—
admitting that it still exists,
even if it no longer bleeds the way it once did.
It hurts to accept that I lost you,
though it hurts more to confess that I don't know exactly when it happened.
There was no single moment to point to—no *here* or *there*—
just a slow, invisible erosion,
like stones shaped by the sea day after day
until their edges vanish,
and no one notices when it began.
The thought of letting you go will not fit in my head.
It will not fit in my chest.
I still carry the memory of how you made me feel,
because there are sensations one fears forgetting:
the way your gaze pierced through me without wounding,
how the world dimmed when you were near,
how my breathing faltered when I heard you laugh.
Your gestures were small, yet heavy with unspoken promise—
promises you perhaps never voiced,
but that I heard all the same,
for sometimes the heart reads glances as if they were words.
I swear that in those moments, I believed you saw me as I saw you.
And though I know now it wasn't true,
I keep the echo of that illusion as if it were a relic.
I clung on—I admit it.
I clung to glances I wished meant more,
to conversations that never came,
to silences I mistook for complicity instead of absence.
My greatest mistake was believing that losing you would shatter the world.
And while it didn't break entirely,
it changed:
the air grew heavier, the streets stretched longer, the nights turned colder.
I learned that one can live with half a heart,
but that scars stay—
like tenants who pay no rent and have no intention of leaving.
I remember the smallest things,
things that to anyone else might seem absurd:
the way you pronounced my name,
with that subtle pause before the final letter,
as if you held it a heartbeat longer to taste it.
The way your gaze lingered on my face when you thought I wasn't looking.
The way you walked beside me without touching me,
keeping just the right distance to make me feel you were protecting me.
Perhaps my error was living trapped in *perhaps*.
Perhaps if I had spoken sooner.
Perhaps if I had found the right words.
Perhaps if time had been kinder.
*Perhaps* is a sweet poison—
you drink it thinking it feeds hope,
when in truth it only stretches the ache.
It has been months since we last truly spoke.
That conversation remains a faint echo,
drifting in some quiet corner of my memory.
I have wondered whether, had we kept talking,
we might have found a meeting point between your world and mine.
But silence is a language too,
and ours says more than we care to admit.
I don't know when I stopped reaching for you.
Maybe it was the day I pictured my life without you,
and—surprisingly—that image did not destroy me.
It hurt, yes,
but there was a trace of relief hiding in the cracks.
I had told myself that if I held on a little longer, I might win you back.
But I came to understand that sometimes the only way to heal is to let go.
Letting go was not simple.
There were nights I replayed every moment, every word,
searching for a mistake I could undo.
I never found one.
There was no catastrophe, no visible betrayal.
We simply stopped arriving in the same place.
We were two lines that looked parallel,
but in truth were drawing apart with every step.
Thinking of you hurt me,
and yet it made me smile.
It was an impossible contradiction—
like trying to embrace a flame and expecting not to burn.
Still, I did it again and again.
I clung to your memory as though it were my only lifeline,
even as it pulled me deeper beneath the surface.
Sometimes I wonder if you ever thought of me the way I thought of you—
if you kept some quiet corner in your mind for a conversation
you didn't want to end,
for a glance that lingered in the air.
I'll never know.
And perhaps I never will.
It pains me to think that maybe—without knowing—I broke your heart too.
I don't know how, or when,
but the thought that I might have hurt you in ways I never saw
terrifies me.
And though it was never my intention,
I cannot deny that I was left broken too.
You were the wound I learned to tend over time—
one that no longer bleeds,
but still burns whenever someone brushes against it.
If one day you return,
I know we will not be the same.
Neither you, nor I.
We will have grown, changed, learned.
And maybe that is both the saddest and most beautiful truth—
that even apart, we remain part of each other's road.
I still keep certain pieces of you—
none of them tangible.
Your voice.
The cadence of your laughter.
The spark in your eyes when something lit you from within.
The weight of your silences—
the kind that weren't empty,
but full of something I never learned to name.
I even keep the moments when I felt invisible beside you,
because they, too, are part of the story.
I never truly said goodbye.
I didn't know how.
Perhaps because a farewell demands a clean ending,
and ours faded like a forgotten candle—
no one blew it out;
it simply burned itself away.
By the time I noticed,
there was nothing left but smoke.
Sometimes I dream of you.
Not in grand scenes,
but in quiet moments:
you speaking about something you love,
me laughing at your foolishness,
the two of us walking slowly down some nameless street.
And when I wake,
I feel as though the dream were more real than waking life.
Writing this changes nothing.
It isn't an attempt to win you back,
nor to demand answers.
It is only my way of arranging the disorder you left behind.
For I have learned that some stories do not end with a slammed door,
but with a whisper that slowly dissolves into silence.
I would like to say I no longer think of you,
that I have left it all behind.
But that would be a lie.
Sometimes a song, a scent, a single word is enough
for you to return—
not as a ghost to haunt me,
but as a light shadow that walks just behind me,
reminding me that part of me still lives with you.
Maybe one day I will read these words
and feel no knot in my throat.
Perhaps, with time, today's melancholy will soften into gratitude.
Because though it hurt, there was beauty too.
That is the paradox of loving you—
that even in the loss,
some fragment of light remains.
If I could speak to you again,
I wouldn't ask for explanations or cast blame.
I would simply say *thank you*.
Thank you for the moments you gave me,
for the laughter, for the glances,
even for the silences that I now understand in another way.
Thank you for having been—
even if not forever.
And if these words should ever find you,
I hope you read them with the same stillness with which I write them now.
I hope you see they are not a grievance,
but an homage to what we once were.
Because even if we no longer belong to each other's present,
there will always be a place in my memory
where you and I are still walking side by side.