Missing, I have learned, is not one thing. It is a drawer of mismatched silverware, a forked tongue that still remembers sweetness even as it names the wound.
I miss the version of myself who didn't flinch, who mistook the bruise for proof of being chosen, who counted your silences like scripture and called the cruelty passion because no one had taught him the difference yet.
I miss the smallness of those rooms, how a single lamp could make a kingdom of a bed, how the dark outside the window made your hands feel like the only weather worth surviving.
I miss the guy who lit the cigarette and let it burn down to his knuckle just to feel something arrive on time, who learned the names of all your moods the way other people learned constellations.
I miss the shape you left, the negative space where a person should be, the echo mistaken so often for a voice that I forgot how to listen for my own.
And I miss my friends, I miss clubbing.
I miss getting drunk at a party.
I miss getting sad when I hit it and I miss your lips, I admit it.
I miss my car, I miss smoking. I miss your neck for the choking.
I miss your skin and your clothing, I miss hanging out and overdosing.
I miss crying in the middle of the night and I miss your ginger hair, your starlight. I miss your green eyes, the moonlight.
I miss the old pub and their sprites. I miss your lighter, I missed your flight.
I miss spitting in your mouth. I miss the thrill, I miss the fight, I miss the way you'd touch me at night.
I miss the hate, I miss the pain. I miss the rush of your drunken shame. I miss the scorn, I miss the bite. I miss the chaos in the dead of night.
I miss the guilt, I miss the pride. I miss the way you tried to hide. I miss the masks, I miss the games.
I miss the thrill of calling your name.
There is a science to it, almost, how the way grief metabolizes into something with teeth, the way a body keeps the receipts long after the mind has filed the case closed. I miss like an old smoker misses smoke: not the substance, but the ritual, the small ceremony of ruin performed on schedule, like a vow.
I miss the boy who didn't know yet that love could arrive without a fist behind it, that tenderness didn't have to be earned through some elaborate audition of pain. I miss how sure I was, back then, that being wanted and being wrecked were the same weather system, that I could read the barometric drop in your voice and call it intimacy.
I miss the after, always the after. The cigarette shared in silence, ash falling like punctuation on sentences neither of us would finish. The way forgiveness tasted like smoke too, indistinguishable from what caused the fire.
I miss the boy in the mirror of that apartment, the one who practiced his face into something unbothered, who learned to hold his voice steady the way you'd hold a glass too full, careful, too careful, don't spill the evidence.
I miss the nights we built a whole mythology out of nothing: your hand, my hand, the streetlight doing its one trick through the blinds, over and over, a magician with a single coin. We thought it was fate. It was just bad lighting and two people starving for the same kind of attention.
I miss believing the wreck was the proof of the depth, that a love which didn't bruise couldn't be real love, that gentleness was just a story people told before the good part started. I unlearned that the way you unlearn a native tongue: slowly, and then all at once, and you still dream in it sometimes, waking with its syllables still warm in your mouth.
I miss the boy who didn't yet know that he would survive this, that there'd be a version of him, years out, in a different light, who could hold this story without it holding him back, who could say I miss it the way you'd say it rained that summer. It's a fact, not a verdict.
I miss it the way a mouth misses a tooth it bit through, the tongue keeps returning to the gap, testing the rawness, the wet absence, unable to leave well enough unbruised. I miss the taste of you under my nails the morning after, when I'd forget and bring my hand to my own mouth and find you still there, ferric, faint, a memory with a flavor.
I miss the specific violence of being wanted by you, how it never arrived clean, always with its hand around something, my throat, my wrist, the back of my hair, like desire itself didn't trust me to stay without being held down to the bed by something other than your eyes. I confused the grip for devotion. I called the choke a kind of prayer.
I miss learning each other in the dark, the careful trespass of it, the way your weight on me felt like an argument I kept agreeing to lose. I miss how tenderness and hunger wore the same face that night, how I couldn't tell which one was speaking when you said my name into my collarbone like it was something you were allowed to keep. I miss being undone by you and calling it being known.
I miss waking up not knowing which marks were yours and which were mine, which bruise I'd earned and which I'd asked for, the blue green Rorschach blooming on my hip that I'd press my thumb into on the bus just to feel something answer back. I miss being a body that could be read, underlined, dog eared, written in.
I miss how good I got at lying to the mirror. It's fine, it's just how we are, it's passion. I practiced indifference like a tongue twister, over and over, until I could say I'm fine without my throat remembering it used to mean something else.
I miss the mirror becoming a courtroom, how I learned to stand in front of it like a defendant, looking for the evidence of not being enough. I miss the particular hunger that had nothing to do with food and everything to do with wanting to take up less space in a world that already made me feel like an apology. I miss thinking I could shrink myself into someone worth keeping, like love was a measurement I could pass if I just got small enough.
I miss the quiet math I did instead of sleeping, the way control became the only language I trusted, since everything else about that year felt like it was happening to me instead of being chosen by me. I miss confusing discipline with disappearing, believing the less I asked of the world the less the world could take from me. I miss how a number became a kind of mirror too, one that lied as beautifully as you did, promising that if I just kept going I'd finally arrive somewhere safe.
I miss not yet knowing that starving myself smaller never made the love stay, that the body was never the reason, that no amount of vanishing could have fixed something that was never about my body at all. I miss the boy who thought control was the same thing as healing, who didn't know yet that you can survive a year like that and still be allowed to take up space, still be allowed to eat without apologizing for it, still be allowed to look in a mirror and see a person instead of a problem to solve.
I miss how convinced I was that I had to earn the right to exist in a room, that being seen was a privilege I hadn't yet qualified for. I miss the particular loneliness of being your own harshest witness, cataloguing every flaw like it was evidence in a case I was always going to lose. I miss believing that if I could just get quiet enough, small enough, careful enough, I could finally stop being afraid of myself.
I miss the version of love I confused with worth, the idea that I had to be impressive to be wanted, flawless to be forgiven, perfect to be safe. I miss how exhausting it was to live inside a mind that kept moving the finish line, that took every small mercy I gave myself and called it laziness, that mistook self punishment for self improvement and never once asked what I actually needed.
I miss not knowing yet that the voice telling me I wasn't enough was never trying to help me, that it just wanted somewhere to live, and it had found a willing house in a boy who already doubted he deserved softness. I miss learning, slowly, that healing wasn't about becoming someone new, but about finally believing the person I already was had been worth defending all along.
Still some nights the static finds me, some nights I reach for the lighter out of habit, not desire, and I let myself remember, not because I want you back but because the missing is its own small mercy: proof that something happened to me once, that I was not always this calm, this far away, this unafraid to call it what it was.
And maybe that's the whole of it: not forgiveness, not even peace, just the quiet arithmetic of a life that kept going anyway, that turned the wreckage into weather, something you can name and watch pass over, something that no longer has to be the sky. But some nights I miss the storm. Some nights I'd take the lightning just to feel my own pulse again, just to remember I was once something worth striking.
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