What if I miss you a year from now?

I have been repeating the same thing to myself for a few years now; the question prevails over time, much like a flower found inside a book.

It is like finding a ghost that is kind, yet at the same time heartbreaking because of the memory of what it comes to mean.

The weight of the year passes like the heavy covers of a closed book left on the shelf, where time goes on as normal.

I think that by closing the book, the longing that is painful today becomes flat, simple and a bit manageable, though always present.

But every time I find this flower by accident, everything rushes back to me like a thousand gusts of wind.

I look at how thin it has become with time and how fragile it sometimes seems.

There is a kind of love that exists and that I came to know thanks to you.

A love that woke up the day we met, even if I was not aware of it back then.

It is the miracle and the curse of having loved you: that time can dry the petals but it can never wither the root of the memory.

Sometimes I wonder if you also keep a folded page in your memory, or if I am the only one who insists on not closing this book.

Perhaps missing you year after year is not wasting time, but rather the only way I have to keep what we once were suspended in the air.