It Has To Be You
Dear L,
I wake up and you’re always the first thing on my mind. Before the day has even had a chance to begin, there you are; in the silence, in the ache, in that strange space between sleep and waking where the truth always seems hardest to avoid.
I keep being reminded of the nights we spent together. Of all the things we used to be. Of the closeness we shared, the warmth, the intimacy, the way it felt like we had carved out a world of our own somewhere between late hours and quiet words. I keep being reminded of how, no matter how much distance or silence comes between us, there always seems to be some part of us that cannot fully stay away. Some part of us that keeps looking for the other in the smallest things.
Even now, although we find ourselves estranged, I keep seeing our paths brush against each other in these small, uncanny ways. The same posts. The same songs we once shared with each other. The same images finding their way to both of us before one has a chance to comment on it. All of the same things that once tied us to each other and, in some strange way, still do. It is as if even in separation, there are still little threads left behind that neither of us fully knows how to cut. No matter how many threads we do eventually cut, there are always going to be strings that ties to you in my world. Something tells me, it's the same with you.
And maybe that is part of what makes all of this hurt so much. Because for all the distance, for all the pain, for all the damage, I still feel the shape of you in my life. I still feel the absence of what we were. I still carry the memory of your voice, your warmth, the way you made certain moments feel softer, deeper, more alive than they had any right to be.
There are days when I can almost convince myself to keep moving, to stop looking back, to let silence be silence. But then something small pulls me under again - a phrase, a song, a certain hour of night, the memory of the way we used to talk when the rest of the world had gone quiet. And suddenly I am there again, remembering not just what we had, but what it meant to me.
I know things are not simple. I know pain has changed the shape of what this is. I know there are things between us that cannot be undone just because I miss you or because my heart still reaches for you. But none of that changes the truth that you are still with me in ways I do not know how to explain to anybody else.
I miss you. I miss the nights, the tenderness, the familiarity, the feeling that no matter what happened in the world around us, there was still somewhere I could find you. And maybe the cruelest part is that even now, with all this distance, I still catch glimpses of us in the smallest places, like something unfinished still echoing beneath everything. I don’t know what to do with that truth except say it plainly: you are still the first thing on my mind when I wake up, and you are still one of the last things I think about before sleep finds me again.
I guess what I'm trying to say, is.... I still love you. I never stopped loving you. Not for a second. Not through the anger, not through the silence, not through the distance, not even through my own self-destruction. Beneath everything ugly, everything broken, everything I can never take back, that truth remained. I don’t know what to do with this love that has nowhere left to go except back into my own chest, just to ache there in silence. I have lost many things in this life, but nothing has ever felt quite like losing you. Nothing has ever hollowed me out so quietly, so completely.
I don’t care what happens in my future, who walks into my life, who tells me to let it go, or how much time passes between now and whatever is left of us, I will always hold onto the hope that you’ll come back someday. Nobody and nothing will ever take that from me. Hope does not die just because it hurts. And maybe it isn't supposed to. No time, distance, or silence will ever stop me from loving you. In the same sense, the wreckage I left behind, everything I ruined... never stopped you from loving me, either. There's something incredible to be found in that type of love......
You do not owe me a response. A feeling. Or anything. I just needed you to know that I will always love you, and only you.....
Yours, and yours only, D