"love with no place to go"

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.

There was a voice once that stopped me mid-thought — hypnotic, unhurried, like it knew something I didn't. And a laugh that came after it, light and unguarded, the kind you don't forget even when you try. I heard it maybe a handful of times in years of knowing her, and somehow that was enough for it to live in me.

We were never close in the way people mean when they say close — not the same city, not the same age, not even the same chapter of life. Thirteen years and a distance neither of us ever closed stood between us the whole time. And still, something was there. We flirted with it the way people do when neither one is ready to name it. I told myself that not naming it meant it wasn't real. I was wrong about that.

I wasn't ready. Not financially, not otherwise — not in the way a person needs to be ready to close a distance like that. By the time I was, I reached for it, and she told me, gently, that the timing wasn't right. I heard what she meant underneath the words. I didn't argue. I just knew.

So I stepped back. Not out of anger — I was never angry with her, only with myself, with the years I let pass before I was standing in a place I could actually offer her something. I needed the silence to work through what I felt, to see if it would loosen with distance the way these things sometimes do.

It didn't. Not really. It just went quiet enough that I could tell myself I was over it.

Then I saw her page again. A new relationship. A name that wasn't mine. And the quiet broke.

She told me herself, before I could see it and wonder — that's who she is, careful with people, careful with me. She said she loved me, still and always, the way she always had. I said it back, because it's true. She is my best friend. I am happy someone is treating her like the goddess she apparently finds uncomfortable being called, because she deserves exactly that, and more.

But happiness for her and grief for myself are not opposites. They're sitting in the same chair right now, and I'm letting them.

What I'm grieving isn't really her, or not only her. It's a version of things that only existed in the space between two phones, in the time zones we never bridged, in the meeting that almost happened and then didn't. I don't know if I was in love with a person or in love with the idea of one — a woman I built out of a voice, a laugh, and the particular ache of never quite reaching her. Maybe both things are true. Maybe that's what grief with no clear object feels like — mourning something that was real and imagined at once.

I don't intend to make that mistake again — reaching for someone I can love only from a distance, safely, without the risk of being fully seen. That's the part I need to sit with longest, longer than I need to sit with her.

For now, I'll let myself feel this — the loss of a maybe, the ordinary grief of bad timing, the particular sting of watching someone else get to try. I'll carry a piece of her, but I think, if I'm honest, what I'm really carrying is a piece of who I was reaching to become, back when I thought she was the reason to become it.