xo

how do i feel? “xo - xo” (cue laugh track)

[putmeinacomma]

;IIII

one of the greatest tragedies of growing up is how easily people become replaceable to each other.

during youth, friendship feels absolute. there is always a name that comes first. always a person tied naturally to every story, every joke, every small inconvenience life throws their way. someone to call without thinking. someone to sit beside while doing nothing at all.

then, somewhere along the way, closeness becomes scattered.

everyone knows each other, speaks to each other, laughs with each other—but rarely belongs to each other in the way they once did. the world becomes full of temporary conversations and half-kept connections. people become accessible, but not necessarily reachable.

maybe that is why so many carry a loneliness they cannot properly explain.

not because they are alone, but because they miss the feeling of being someone’s first thought. someone’s certainty. someone’s person.

as they say; a friend to all is a friend to none.

and maybe growing up is simply learning how rare it is to find a connection that still chooses depth in a world so comfortable with distance.

-;

[putmeinacomma]

;III

there is a certain kind of story people rarely talk about.

the one where someone learns how to love—

just not with the person who needed it most.

from the outside, it looks effortless. the way their affection is given now, openly, without hesitation. the way it reaches others with a certainty that once felt impossible—and no one sees the quieter version that came before it. the one that had to be asked for.

there was always someone who stood there first.

someone who learned to ask gently,

then smaller,

then not at all.

someone who waited to be acknowledged, to be chosen without having to prove they were worth it.

and eventually, they stopped asking.

not out of bitterness, or jealousy, or some desire to take that place back—but out of understanding. understanding that love should not feel like something you have to earn piece by piece.

still, there is something undeniably unfair in it.

how the version of someone that once felt out of reach becomes so easily available to someone else. how the things that were once withheld are now given freely, without question.

it leaves behind a quiet realization:

sometimes, people do learn how to love better.

they grow into it. they become softer, more certain, more giving.

but not everyone gets to experience that version of them.

some people are only there for the becoming and never the arrival.

- ;

[putmeinacomma]

; II

i am the embodiment of self-destruction.

in days like this i come to find myself tucked into my knees with what seems like breaths unfinished.

what got me into this situation in the first place? i inevitably lead myself here. fully knowing the consequences, i still sprint towards it in the hopes of familiarity in what is lost.

no matter how much i try to convince myself that people will always stay the same from how you remember, reality will always rise above the surface like the heat in my heart that beats to the rhythm of desire. we’re all humans underneath it all, it’s part of our nature to metamorphasize.

the truth of the matter is; they won’t come back. no amount of prayer from any known religion is ever going to change the facts.

- ;

[putmeinacomma]

; I

there is always one person the body remembers long after the mind begins its “forgetting.” strange the way memory does not live only in thought, in muscle, in scent, in sound—it waits like a patient thief.

sometimes it is a song coming from another room.

sometimes the faint trace of a perfume caught in passing.

sometimes the particular hush of noon when its light folds itself across a bed exactly the way it once did before touch found two people instead of one.

sometimes, more cruelly, is the world itself that begins to wear their face.

a figure across the street with their posture. laughter in a café shaped too closely like theirs. a jacket in a crowd the same shade they used to wear.

for one soft, foolish second, your heart rises before your mind can protect it. you feel them beside you again, as if they had never left.

then you think a moment too long.

the shoulders are wrong. the voice belongs to someone else. the stranger turns, and the illusion breaks with the quiet violence only hope can manage. suddenly the street is only a street again. the café returns to noise. the crowd swallows what you wanted to be true.

and still, the body startles each time.

you turn onto your side without thinking, facing the empty stretch beside you, and something in your chest tightens. the body recognizes what the room does not. this was once the direction of warmth. once, this angle meant an arm slung lazily over your waist, breath grazing the back of your neck, the soft rhythm of another person existing close enough to quiet the world.

now it is only sheets. only air. only the sharp education of absence.

yet for a moment—brief and dangerous—you close your eyes.

there they are again.

the mattress dips with familiar weight. fingers trace thoughtless patterns against your skin. the silence between you feels full. you can almost believe love is still nearby, resting just behind your shoulder.

memory can be merciful like that. it recreates the tenderness with astonishing detail, while editing out the ruin.

it does not show the words that bruised after they were spoken. it does not replay the nights spent swallowing tears beside the same body that once felt like shelter. it does not mention how comfort can become a costume worn by cruelty.

it gives you only the good scene, polished and glowing, then asks whether you miss them.

perhaps that is the cruelest part of longing: not that it forgets what happened, but that it knows and reaches anyway.

because there are people who leave fingerprints on the senses. people stitched into seasons, into songs, into the smell of rain or detergent or midnight air. people who become less a person and more a language the body still understands.

you may know exactly what they cost you. you may know the ache they planted, the parts of yourself you had to gather afterward.

and still, in certain quiet moments, with your eyes closed and your heart briefly unguarded, you would give anything to turn back into the version of you that was held.

- ;