u/Fragrant_Ad_5297

there are things about you i learned without ever meaning to. like the exact amount of ice you like in your soda. where you hide chocolate when you don’t want to share. the particular way you go quiet when something hurts, and how your voice changes when you’re trying not to cry.

i learned the geography of your body in the dark - the places my hands could find without looking. the shape of your mouth against mine. the weight of you curled into me beneath the blankets. your hair tangled between my fingers in the morning light.

i remember holding your hand when we were both afraid, and i remember the sound you made when you were trying. i remember how easily you could become soft in my arms, as though for those few minutes the rest of the world had stopped asking anything of you. i remember you.

there are entire versions of you that still exist somewhere inside my memory. the things you couldn’t stop talking about. the things you pretended not to care about. the songs you played too many times. the little habits i teased you about and secretly adored. the expressions that belonged only to you. i saw you.

i knew when you needed silence. i knew when you needed to be held. i knew the difference between your tired voice and your sad one. i knew what your face looked like just before you said something you were afraid to say. i knew you.

and now i will go months without hearing you say a single word. isn’t it strange, to have once known the sound of your breathing beside me - and now i will know nothing about the life happening on the other side of the silence. all those moments are still here, but they don’t belong to us anymore.

they sit quietly in the corners of my mind, too tender to throw away, too painful to hold for very long. just evidence of a life that happened after the people in it have stopped being who they were.

i was expertly versed in you, and now i’m trying to learn the language of being someone who doesn’t know you at all. i hope the best for you.

i make tea when i don’t know what else to do with my hands. i walk until my skin remembers there is still weather in the world. sometimes i sit somewhere unfamiliar and watch strangers carry their groceries. they hold hands, argue softly, live inside their own little afternoons. i try to imagine what it would feel like to belong entirely to myself.

i read because i want to put other people’s thoughts inside my head. i listen to music because sometimes someone else’s voice can say the things mine can’t. i write everything down because i am so tired of carrying it. i leave pieces of myself on paper like breadcrumbs, hoping that one day i can follow them backward and find the person i was before all of this.

i don’t want beautiful words anymore - i don’t want to make a cathedral out of a wound. i just want something to make sense.

i love you in all the inconvenient places. in the quiet ones. in the places i thought would belong to me again once you were gone. i find you hiding in songs, in the grocery aisle, in the shape of the evening light against the wall. sometimes i swear i’ve gone an entire day without thinking of you, only to realize i’ve been thinking around you instead.

truthfully, i don’t actually want to rip this love out of me. i’ve tried to call it a parasite because that makes it easy. i’ve tried to call it a wound, an addiction, a mistake - anything that would make destroying it feel like healing. but maybe i only need to teach it where it is allowed to live.

i tell myself there has to be a middle somewhere. some narrow strip of earth between holding on until i disappear and letting go so completely that i disappear anyway. i don’t know where that place is, but i keep searching for it.

for now, i make another cup of tea. i open the window. i let myself cry without turning it into evidence of anything. and then i write - not to remember and not to forget. just to put the weight somewhere outside of my body for a little while, to give it a place to rest.

i’m 34f and was late diagnosed with autism, adhd, ocd, and ptsd back in march. i’ve been on bupropion for about 8 years for depression, and it helps moderately. the more i’ve learned about myself, the more i wonder how much of what i’ve always called “depression” is actually adhd/autistic burnout making me feel depressed.

my psychiatrist asked about medications i’ve tried before. i told her i’d previously been on lexapro, celexa, and paxil. paxil was a complete disaster for me in my early 20s and i basically felt like i completely lost my mind on it.

she said she’d like to focus on treating the depression first, which i’m comfortable with.

she initially suggested zoloft, but i told her i really wanted to avoid ssris because of my already low energy, being a recovered anorexic, and my historically low libido. those are a big part of why i ended up staying on bupropion all these years. she didn’t push it at all and instead suggested starting lamictal, then increasing the dose in two weeks. i agreed to give that a try.

after that, she wants to address my adhd. because i struggle so much with irritability and getting overwhelmed by overstimulation, she wants to try a non stimulant first. she mentioned guanfacine/intuniv or strattera, but also brought up concerta as a possibility. she said if those don’t end up working, she’s completely open to trying vyvanse later.

we also ordered pharmacogenomic testing to see how i metabolize different medications.

i think what’s overwhelming me is just how many possibilities there are. i know this is a process and that there’s no way to know what will work until i try it, but i’m really sensitive to medication changes, so i’m honestly feeling pretty scared right now.

i’d love to hear from anyone who’s had a similar medication journey, especially if you’ve taken lamictal, guanfacine/intuniv, strattera, concerta, or vyvanse. what was your experience? did it take a while to find the right combination? i’m just looking for some reassurance that this part gets a little less overhwelming.

someone once told me that there are forests that refuse to acknowledge a fallen tree. that the roots continue sending messages toward a trunk that no longer answers - beneath the soil nothing has been changed. water still travels the old routes, fungi keep delivering impossible correspondence to an address that has already become sky.

and i think it’s because the earth is slower than grief.
or perhaps that’s mercy - perhaps every living thing deserves a season where reality arrives late enough to survive it.

i think i have been living there.

my hands still prepare for your shape before remembering they belong to only one person now. i still collect stories without realizing i’ve already chosen who they were for. entire conversations bloom inside me before they discover they have nowhere left to land.

that’s the business of misery, they say.

last week i told someone i don’t think memory is stored in the mind, i think it nests inside expectation. inside reaching for another plate. inside turning toward the passenger seat. inside laughing before checking whether someone else has already started. the body keeps rehearsing a future that has quietly left the theater.

and every rehearsal is beautiful,
and every rehearsal ends the same way.

sometimes i wonder if missing someone is just another form of migration. geese leave because something older than thought tells them it’s time. they return because something older than memory tells them where. year after year they redraw the same invisible map across a sky that never promised to keep anything waiting for them.

i think part of me is still flying that route.

not because it doesn’t know, maybe because it knows exactly where it’s going. maybe instinct survives hope. maybe the body keeps believing in spring long after the season has learned your name.

i wish i were finished arriving at your absence.
i wish loving you had obeyed smaller laws.
i wish instinct could be reasoned with.
i wish my hands would stop speaking a language my life no longer understands.
i wish this ending would stop pretending to be an ending.

because every morning i wake up still carrying the impossible conviction that there must be one more page.

today, that therapist had me successfully set up with a medication management psych. my first appointment with her is the 14th, weekly normal therapy every friday. 🥰

we are moving in the right direction and i feel so relieved. just needed to share this with some people who get it!

they say grief is stored in the body. in the jaw, in the shoulders, in the space between your ribs where your lungs forget how to expand all the way. they say hindsight is a trick of the brain, that once we know the ending, we start editing the beginning.

but i don’t know if that’s true.

i just know there are conversations i wish i had sooner and conversations i wish i had never had at all. they say forgetting is natural, but i think they underestimate devotion. not because distance fixes anything, but because standing still turns memory into a monument.

and monuments are difficult things.

——

here is what i carried into the wreckage

impatience. fear disguised as logic. the need to be understood immediately. old wounds i swore weren’t influencing me anymore. the belief that if i could just explain myself clearly enough, nobody would ever leave.

here is what i know stayed

a few unfair words. some silences that should have been conversations. moments where i chose being right over being kind. moments where i asked someone to carry weight that belonged to me. a version of myself that was always waiting for proof it was safe.

here is what i carried away

a diagnosis that explained too much and not enough. a stack of screenshots. airport terminals. songs i can no longer listen to casually. a tendency to overexplain. a half finished project. a ring that knew a future i never got to meet. recipes memorized by repetition. the shape of your laugh. every version of myself that tried harder. a phone full of evidence. my hands. my skin. my bones.

here is what i left behind

a seat beside me. routines built for two people. plans that stretched years ahead. conversations that never reached their conclusions. a version of home. a handful of apologies. a thousand tiny acts of care with nowhere left to land. the person i was becoming with you. certainty. the illusion that understanding something means you can save it.

——

somewhere between what i carried and what i left, there is still me. and when you find yourself standing in the wreckage trying to calculate who loved harder, who tried longer, who left first, who ruined what - leave the math unfinished. nobody gets their heart back by balancing the equation - grief and guilt often share a face. n