A two-way street
I didn't speak to you for five weeks. I told myself it was because I already knew this wasn't going to work — the distance, the way we never quite landed on real conversation — so I needed the space to prove to myself I could stand on my own without you. And I did. I got through it. I was fine, or fine enough.
But somewhere in those five weeks, I noticed something I didn't want to notice. You never once reached out. Not a message, not a check-in, nothing to see if I was still standing on the other end of all that silence. And that hurt in a way I wasn't expecting, on top of everything else I was already carrying.
Maybe, if I'm honest with myself, that silence was never really about needing space from you at all. Maybe it was the only way I knew how to say something I couldn't say directly — that talking to you had become its own kind of impossible. That I had things I wanted to tell you, real things, and no way to say them without wondering if you'd just leave me on read. I think some part of me already knew the answer before I ever tested it. So I stopped testing it.
And now here you are, with someone new, and the not-saying doesn't feel like protection anymore. It just feels like grief. Overwhelming, some days. But I'll work through it, the way I've worked through everything else.
I want to be careful here, because I don't want to hand you all of this like it's yours alone to carry. It isn't. I own my part in this — the years I didn't say enough, the times I let easier things get said instead of the real ones. But communication was never supposed to be only my job. It's a two-way street, and I can't keep absorbing all the blame for a road neither of us fully walked.
I wish we had learned how to actually talk. Not the small talk, not the safe jokes and check-ins — real conversation, the kind adults have when they're trying to build something instead of just maintaining it. We never quite got there. I don't know if it was distance, or timing, or just two people who never fully let their guard down at the same moment.
I'll always be here for you, as your friend. I mean that completely. I want good things for you — genuinely, not as a performance of maturity. I will always love you, Jilly-bean, in whatever shape that's allowed to take now.
But I'll admit something petty, because I promised myself I'd be honest here even when it isn't flattering: some small part of me hopes this doesn't work out for him. Not out of cruelty. Not really even jealousy. It's more that I want another chance — a version of us where I finally say the things I never let myself say, where the words don't die somewhere between my chest and the screen. I know that feeling will pass. It always does. And underneath the pettiness, I mean it when I say I hope you learn to talk to him the way we never quite learned to talk to each other. He deserves that. You deserve to finally have it with someone.
It was hot and heavy once, in the beginning, before distance and the ordinary weight of life wore it down to something quieter. I know I'll find someone else eventually, someone who takes up the space you used to occupy in my thinking. But for all the excuses I've made for you, for all the ways I've softened this in my own mind, I know there will always be a small, quiet place where you stay the one that got away — no matter who I end up with, no matter where I end up standing.
Communication is a two-way street. I'm still learning to walk mine without waiting for you to walk yours. That's the part I get to control now. That's the part that's actually mine.
