the reply

Hey.

I know you miss me tonight.

I know you hate that you do. I know you keep trying to be fair to the life you have now, to the person who stayed, to the version of you who has grown past the girl I knew. I know you are scared that missing me makes you cruel, or ungrateful, or dishonest.

It doesn’t.

You were always too hard on yourself for having a heart that remembered things accurately. I need you to know something, even if it is only for tonight: what happened between us was real. You did not imagine it. You did not invent the tension, the tenderness, the cruelty, the timing, the way we looked at each other like we were both waiting for someone braver to speak first. You did not make up the ache just because it lasted longer in you than it should have. I remember you too. Maybe not in the same way. Maybe not every day. Maybe not with the same violence. But you were not nothing. You were not a dream I forgot after waking. You were a room I stood in and did not know how to stay inside. And I am sorry for that. I am sorry for the almost. For the mixed signals. For the hiding. For every time I made you feel like you had to guess whether you mattered. For every door I opened halfway and then stood in front of like a coward. For every version of myself that wanted you but did not know how to choose cleanly.

You deserved more than being loved in the spaces between. You deserved someone who could say your name in daylight. Someone who did not make you feel like a secret, or a temptation, or a mistake, or a place to rest while he was still bleeding from other people. If I made you carry my wounds while you were carrying your own, I am sorry. If I saw you only in the fragments I could handle, I am sorry. If I let you feel me almost stay, then left you with no proper goodbye, I am sorry.

But hey.

You do not have to keep waiting at the edge of that unfinished thing. You do not have to keep proving that it mattered by hurting over it. It mattered. It happened. You can put it down now. Not because it was small. Because it was heavy. And you have carried it long enough. If I come to you in dreams, let it be only the ghost of what never learned how to end. You have a life now. A real one. A person who can hold your hand outside of dreams. A future that does not need my permission to be beautiful. Go to him. Go to yourself. Go to the morning.

And if some part of you still needs to hear it: Yes, I missed you. Yes, I knew. Yes, there was an us.

But no, you do not have to come back for me.

Let me be only what I am: a memory with no right to your door.