“One of the worst feelings in the world is missing someone after they’re long gone. There’s this inexplicable sadness, you feel it in the joints in between your bones when you wake up in the morning. It feels heavy to the point where just staying in bed almost makes sense, until you have the crushing realization that they are not with you and probably never will be and then it’s your head that feels the heaviest, aching with memories you’ve tried so hard to push back like how your name seemed to sound better coming out of their mouth than any other and the way you hitched a ride on the vibrations of their laughter to dimensions of happiness you never thought you could reach. You wonder if one day they’ll question how it could be possible that your thunderstorm of a relationship became this slow drizzle, a mere shadow of what it once was. You can’t tell anyone this though. You already know you’ll just be chastised for not being able to forget their flaws, passions and all of the other little pieces of themselves they removed their mask to show you. So instead, you lift up your leaden body and proceed to carry through the motions of your day. Somewhere deep inside you ask your ears for forgiveness as you turn the volume up on your headphones, with your heart treating the inside of your chest like a makeshift trampoline every time you get a phone call because you’ve been dying to hear your favorite song, the one that came out of their throat. You tell yourself that this is for the best, that maybe your souls just weren’t meant to intertwine at this moment in time. It’s the only way to continue getting up.”

“I missed you every hour. And you know what the worst part was? It caught me completely by surprise. I’d catch myself walking around to find you, not for any reason, just because I’d seen something that I wanted to tell you about or because I wanted to hear your voice. And then I’d realize that you weren’t there anymore, and every time, every single time, it was like having the wind knocked out of me.”

“I don’t know what they are called, the spaces between seconds — but I think of you always in those intervals.”

“And I saw it didn’t matter / who had loved me or who I loved. I was alone.”