i miss you in ways you’ll never feel

“i don’t text you anymore. i don’t check your profile. i don’t ask about you or bring your name up in conversations that used to be filled with you. but that doesn’t mean i’ve stopped missing you. it just means i’ve learned how to miss you quietly. some days, you’re a song i skip because i know the chorus will feel too much like your hands. other days, you’re a stranger’s laugh in a café and for a second, i turn around like my heart still believes in miracles. i miss you in ways that feel invisible— in half-finished poems, in coffee gone cold, in the way i overthink every silence because you taught me that silence sometimes means goodbye. i wonder if you ever think about me when the sky looks like the night we first talked too long, when the air smells like november and all the things we never said come back for a visit. i wonder if your heart ever pauses when you pass the place we once called ours, even if only in passing. i still remember how you liked your tea, how your voice dipped when you talked about your dreams, how you pulled your sleeves down when you were nervous. i don’t know why i remember so many small things. maybe because those were the only parts you let me keep. sometimes i miss the version of you that only existed when we were alone. the one that wasn’t performing, wasn’t distant, wasn’t afraid of being soft. i don’t blame you for leaving, or for never choosing me in full. but god— i wish you had told me how to unlove someone who felt like home. it’s strange how people become ghosts while still being alive. how someone can exist in the same world but not in your life and yet still somehow take up so much space in your chest. i write about you not because i want you back, but because some stories don’t know how to end. they just linger. they just echo. they just stay in the back of your throat like a name you stopped saying out loud. and i know i’ll fall in love again. i’ll meet someone who asks questions you never did, who stays when it gets hard, who doesn’t leave me guessing if i matter. but i also know there will always be a small, quiet part of me that remembers you kindly. not perfectly, but honestly. because even if you weren’t mine, you mattered. and maybe that’s the hardest part— not losing someone, but losing the future you secretly built with them in the quiet corners of your mind. i still talk to you in my head. still imagine what you’d say if you saw me now. still wonder if you’d be proud or if it wouldn’t matter at all. some nights, i look up at the stars and pretend you’re doing the same. that somewhere, in some parallel life, we got it right. you stayed. i spoke. we loved without fear. but this isn’t that life. and you’re not mine. so i’ll keep missing you in all the silent ways— the ways that don’t ask for answers, don’t need replies, just a little space in my heart where you used to live.”