I miss you as if we had a lifetime together.
I miss you like I’ve lost something permanent.
I miss you as if we lived days, made promises, and fell asleep to each other’s breathing.
I miss you like a home I swore was real, even though I never stepped inside.
I built countless versions of you in my head. Versions that stayed, loved me back, and saw what I was too afraid to say out loud.
I imagined your hand in mine in rooms we never entered, conversations we never finished, and smiles we never exchanged.
But I still remember your voice. The soft way it cleared the static of my bad days. The casual “I’ll always be here” that I gripped like a lifeline. You didn’t know it, but a single question once rescued me from a very dark place. You never stayed long enough to witness the depth of my fall, and perhaps you weren’t supposed to.
Even so, I wish you had. God, I really wish you had.
You never asked me to love you, but I did quietly, completely, and pathetically well.
There were so many things I wanted to say, but didn’t. I was afraid of the sheer weight of those words… afraid you’d drop them. So instead, I loved you silently because the truth was too heavy for your hands, and now it’s too heavy for mine.
I think about you when I hear a song I drafted to send, or when something good happens, and I instinctively reach for my phone before I remember that we don’t talk anymore. Most of our story played out in my head, but even there, in my imagination, you still left me.
And yet, I still come back to you.
There’s this version of you I carry around: the you who noticed me in all the ways that mattered, who stayed and asked me to stay too. Most of all, the you who:
* reached for my hand when the world was loud,
* made space for me in a heart that didn't flinch at the weight of being known.
Yet, he only exists in my memory, or in a life that never happened.
Is it insane to be this heartbroken over something that technically didn’t exist? To grieve a version of you that never breathed the way I imagined?
People say you can’t lose what you never had, but they’ve never loved like this. They’ve never stood in a burning house no one else could see, holding onto ashes, and calling them memoirs.
I think you’d be surprised at how much of you I retained… how much of me you took with you.
I’m so homesick for you. I’m homesick for the home I made out of imagined futures and for the kind of love that only ever lived in silence.
If I could rewind time, I would hold that feeling one more time… that beautiful thing that maybe you were mine too.
Still… I miss you like you were everything. Because to me, you were everything.
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