— i’m happy and healed, see you in the next life :-)
I saw them together tonight. That was the proof. The quiet kind that sinks in and rearranges the furniture while you’re still standing in the doorway. He looked finished in the way someone looks when they’ve already metabolized the thing that almost killed them.
When she said his name, his friends looked at me. Every single fucking time. Not her. Me. As if my face was a mirror they expected to show something cracking. As if I were the remaining evidence of a former life. There’s a particular humiliation in being observed like that. It was like being reduced to context.
On the drive back home, I saw the message on the back of a truck. White paint. Careless handwriting. A smiley face that felt obscene in its optimism:
“I’m happy and healed. See you in the next life. :-)”
I let myself believe it was for me.
I imagined him saying it the way he used to say things when he wanted to be kind without being pulled back under, Offering a clean ending from a safe distance. “I’m okay now”, he’d say. “You don’t have to carry me anymore.”
And in that imagined world, we were once the same fire. The same hunger. The same damage. Two people who recognized each other instantly and mistook recognition for destiny. We burned because we were made of the same material. That’s what made us real. That’s what made us unsustainable.
“We can’t stay,” he tells me there. His voice steady, relieved. “You know that.”
I nod, because I do know. Loving him felt like living inside weather. Beautiful, violent, impossible to build a life in. He didn’t survive me by accident. He survived me by leaving.
“I’m grateful,” he says. And I believe that part. I believe I mattered. I believe I cracked him open just enough for the light to get in.
What I don’t believe; and what hurts in a quieter, more permanent way, is that he ever fell like I did.
Because gratitude is not grief.
And healing is not longing.
He looks at me the way someone looks at a former self. Fondly, vaguely and without urgency. He thanks me the way you thank a fire for warmth once you’ve learned not to touch it again.
And then there’s the other option. The real one.
I can stay here. Keep replaying his voice. Keep believing we were one thing split in two by timing, by fear, by the simple fact that one of us needed more. I can call it fate. I can call it unfinished. I can rot inside the idea that if either of us had been braver, we would have worked.
Or I can do what he already did.
I can accept that being the same doesn’t mean being meant to stay. That some people meet only to recognize themselves and move on. That loving him was the point, not keeping him.
He doesn’t turn back in real life.
He never says the words out loud.
He doesn’t owe them to me.
So I say them to myself instead.
“Thank you. I’m letting you go. I’ll live this life for me.”
And somewhere, whether he ever thinks of me again or not, he keeps being happy.
turnnoffyourmind
annaxmalina
areudirty
romaincrisis
snowghoul
stormborns
