There are nights where I sit so long in my own silence that it starts sounding like another person breathing in the room with me. Maybe it’s you. Maybe it’s just the version of me that existed before everything started dissolving around the edges.
I think about you most when the world gets quiet in that dangerous way. The kind of quiet that makes your chest feel too big for your body. The kind where every memory suddenly crawls out from wherever you buried it.
You’ve been gone long enough now that I’m starting to lose the real things.
Not the important things. Those stay lodged in me like glass under skin.
The way your laugh started before the joke finished.
The shape your face made when you were trying not to smile.
I hate that photographs have become proof instead of reminders. I hate that sometimes I need a video just to remember you were real and not something my mind invented to survive itself.
And when I do see you again through a screen, it hits me all at once like getting dragged underwater.
Alive in a way I no longer know how to be.
Meanwhile I became somebody strange.
Somebody I don’t think you’d recognize at first glance.
My mouth tastes like cigarettes that weren’t mine, warm beer gone flat, cocaine rubbed against gums at three in the morning while strangers laugh too loudly in kitchens I barely remember entering. I move through cities and bedrooms and neon bathrooms like a ghost pretending to be a girl. Everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
People touch my shoulders and say my name and I still feel absent from my own life.
I keep thinking there has to be a purpose hidden somewhere beneath all this noise, but every road I take folds back into itself. I wake up exhausted from nights I can’t fully remember. I watch the sunrise feeling older than I should. Sometimes I catch my reflection in shop windows and feel this brief, awful disconnect, like I’m looking at somebody who stole my body and learned how to imitate me badly.
I wonder what you would say if you saw me now.
Would you look disappointed?
Or would you just understand immediately without making me explain it?
Because you were always good at seeing through things.
You knew when people were pretending. You knew when silence meant something heavier than silence. I think that’s why losing you split the world into a before and after. You were one of the few people who made existence feel solid.
After you died, everything started slipping.
It’s terrifying how life keeps moving even when somebody important stops existing inside it. Cars still pass. Summers still arrive. Songs still come out. People still fall in love at bars and complain about work and buy groceries like the world hasn’t ended somewhere.
I wanted the sky to crack open for you.
Instead it just became Tuesday for everybody else.
Sometimes I think grief rewired me permanently. Like part of me froze at the exact age I lost you while the rest kept growing around it wrong. Crooked. Uneven.
I learned how to survive, maybe, but not how to belong anywhere afterward.
Not even the drugs or the self-destruction or the nights spent trying to outrun my own head.
The way I drift from people while standing right beside them.
The way nothing fully reaches me anymore.
The way happiness feels temporary even while it’s happening, like I’m already mourning it before it leaves.
And still, somehow, you remain untouched inside my memory.
You are still standing in sunlight somewhere in my mind with dirt under your nails and unfinished plans in your pockets. Still leaving jackets over chairs. Still saying “I’ll see you” instead of goodbye because neither of us understood how final things could become.
I think that’s why I miss you so violently sometimes.
Not just because you’re gone.
Because you remember a version of me that no longer exists.
A girl who still believed her life was heading somewhere beautiful.
Maybe that’s what growing up actually is. Realizing you can become unrecognizable to yourself while everybody else calls it normal.
There are nights I sit outside with a drink in my hand and try to imagine telling you everything honestly. The parties. The emptiness. The stupid decisions. The loneliness hiding underneath all the movement. I imagine your face listening to me without interrupting.
And for a second I can almost hear you again.
Not from an old voicemail.
From somewhere deeper than memory.
Like you still exist in the parts of me that haven’t completely died yet.
I hope wherever you are, you still laugh before the punchline.
I hope there’s sunlight there.
I hope time is kinder to you than it was here.
And if there’s any part of you that still sees me somehow, I hope you know I didn’t become this person on purpose.
I think I just kept walking around with a hole in my chest for too long and eventually the wind started passing straight through me.
