Astra

Even though I wake up each day with the ghost of you still haunting the corners of everything, the weight eases, just a little. I kept going with the Scholar Branch, Maeve is growing into her own, this fierce independent girl boss who refuses to bend. Cel was adopted by Mare and made her heir. Life keeps reshaping itself, in-game and out, whether I’m ready or not.

Real life is… a mess. I knew it would be after everything came to light. I don’t know where any of it is leading, and honestly, most days I’m terrified to look too far ahead. But forward is the only direction left to me. Therapy has started, maybe nothing can be fully repaired, maybe some things have been broken too long, but no one really knows what tomorrow might bring, good or bad.

Mentally, I’m still a coin toss.

It all goes back to that battlefield, if I’m honest. I lost myself there. Whoever I was before died in the dirt that day, and I’ve been wandering ever since, going through the motions because that’s what society expected, drifting from one safe harbor to the next… until the last one was taken away from me, ironically on Veterans Day. The poetry of that? The universe really outdid itself. Chef’s kiss.

No one can save me. No one can fix me. No one is truly mine to lean on.

The only person I can rely on now is myself. So I keep forcing my feet forward, even when they drag, because the past has nothing left for me. Only ghosts live there.

And you’re one of them now. Not out of cruelty, not out of blame, I don’t resent you for any of it. You helped me in every moment you could, and I’m grateful. But you had to become a ghost to save yourself, and I’ll never fault you for choosing survival. I’ll never carry bitterness toward you.

But I have to move forward, or I’ll drown in everything I can’t change. So… this will be my last post. I hope with everything in me that life gives you what you’re reaching for. I hope you both heal, that things truly work out, that you get the family you want, the peace you deserve.

I’ll never forget you. I’ll never forget what you gave me. You are a remarkable soul, and you pushed me farther than you probably realize.

Astra and back, my friend. Always.

I had to fall to lose it all, but in the end it doesn’t even matter.

Everyone loves to preach that bullshit line: “If they had just reached out… I would’ve listened.”

No. They wouldn’t have. I’ll say it plain, nobody picks up the damn phone. Nobody follows through.

People don’t mean a word of it.

There is no one waiting to listen.

There is no safety net.

There is no “support system.”

It’s all just pretty little lies people tell themselves so they don’t have to face their own guilt.

Empty promises. Hollow comfort.

They only start “caring” once they get to play the grieving victim.

Before that?

It’s silence.

It’s abandonment.

It’s you, alone, while everyone else pretends they would’ve done something.

I reach for my phone every night, instinctively wanting to tell you something small, something silly, something honest… and then I remember you’re not there anymore. And the quiet that follows, it crushes me.

You weren’t just the person I loved. You were my best friend, my safest place, the one who understood me in ways even the people standing right next to me never could. Losing you feels like losing half my world, and somehow the half that made everything else make sense. I never realized how much of my life was built around the warmth of your voice, the softness in your late-night messages, the way you always knew when I needed someone, even from thousands of miles away.

Now I lie in bed every night and cry, not just because you’re gone, but because I don’t know how to exist without the version of me that existed with you. I miss the simple things most, the goodnights, the stupid jokes, the comfort of knowing that no matter what happened in my day, I had someone waiting for me on the other side of a screen who loved me just as fiercely as I loved them. I still turn toward my phone like a reflex, and every time it doesn’t light up with your name, something inside me cracks again.

What hurts most is knowing that the distance didn’t just steal our romance, it stole our friendship. It took the laughter, the secrets, the dreams we built across time zones. It took the person I confided in when I felt like I was falling apart. Now I’m falling, and you’re nowhere to catch me. And I keep wondering if you feel even a fraction of this emptiness or if the silence has already settled into something easier for you.

I hope you know that everything we shared mattered. It wasn’t small or fragile or forgettable. It shaped me. You shaped me. And even though you're gone, I still feel your absence the way someone feels phantom pain, aching for something that should still be there but isn’t.