From Me, To Him

My room is a mess, but not in a way that can be cleaned.

It’s not just the papers scattered across the floor or the books left open on pages I never finished. It’s the way everything feels abandoned halfway through existing. Cups of tea sit where I left them, cold and untouched, thin layers forming on the surface like time itself has gone stale. I don’t remember when I made the last one. I don’t remember when I stopped drinking them.

Days pass, I think. They must. The light changes, slipping through the curtains at different angles, but it doesn’t feel like time. It feels like being stuck in a single moment that keeps stretching, thinner and thinner, until I’m not sure it exists at all.

I don’t eat.

It’s not that I forget. My body reminds me. It aches, hollow and insistent, a dull pull under my ribs that comes and goes in waves. I feel it when I stand too quickly, when my hands shake just a little too much, when my thoughts blur at the edges. I know I’m hungry. I always know.

I just… don’t answer it.

There’s something easier about letting the hunger sit there, quiet and gnawing, than trying to fill it. Like if I ignore it long enough, it’ll become part of me. Like everything else. Like your letter.

Your letter is on my bedside table.

I don’t remember how many times I’ve read it. The paper is soft now, worn at the folds, like it’s been handled too much. I trace the words sometimes, slowly, following the shape of your handwriting as if it might lead me back to you.

It doesn’t.

I try to imagine you saying those things out loud. I try to hear your voice the way it used to sound—steady, certain, full of something I never quite understood. But it’s wrong. Every version of you in my head feels incomplete, like I’m remembering you through water.

You thought I’d be fine.

That’s the part I keep coming back to.

Not the goodbye. Not even the things you said about the future. Just that one quiet certainty, woven into everything else. Like it was obvious. Like it was inevitable.

Like I was someone who knew how to live without you.

I move through the apartment without really deciding to. One moment I’m at the desk, staring at a page I haven’t written on, and the next I’m standing in the kitchen, holding a plate I don’t remember taking out. Sometimes I stay there for a long time, just looking at it.

I know what I’m supposed to do.

I just don’t.

The outside world keeps going.

It’s beautiful.

I hate it.

We were supposed to see it together. That was the point, wasn’t it? All those years, all those plans, all those promises—every step forward was meant to lead there.

But it didn’t.

Now it’s just… there. Existing without you. Existing without us. Like it never needed us at all.

Sometimes I think about what it would have been like if you stayed.

Not the version where everything is perfect. I don’t even want that. I just wonder what it would have been like if you had let me see you properly. If you had let me see the fear, the doubt—if you had trusted me enough to not leave.

Would that have changed anything?

I don’t know.

I think about it anyway. Over and over, like if I follow the thought far enough, I’ll find something different at the end.

I never do.

Nights are worse.

Everything gets quieter, but my head doesn’t. I lie in bed, staring at the ceiling, your letter pressed flat against my chest, and I try not to think. It doesn’t work. It never works.

I replay everything. Every conversation. Every moment I could have said something different, done something different, been someone better.

It all leads to the same place.

You leaving.

I tell myself I’m still here.

That should mean something, right?

I get up in the morning—if it’s morning. I move from room to room. I pick things up and put them down. Sometimes I even force myself to swallow a few bites of food, just enough to quiet the worst of the shaking.

It’s not living.

It’s not even trying to live.

It’s just… continuing.

You said I was strong.

I don’t think you understood what that meant.

This isn’t strength. There’s nothing noble about it. Nothing admirable. It’s just a refusal to disappear, even when everything in me feels like it already has.

I’m still here.

But it doesn’t feel like proof of anything.

The room stays messy. The tea keeps going cold. The pages stay half-written. The hunger never really leaves—it just settles deeper, quieter, until it feels like it belongs there.

And you—

You stay gone.

I think that’s the worst part. Not the pain, not the emptiness, not even the way everything feels slightly out of place, like the world shifted without telling me.

It’s that nothing changes.

Not really.

Days pass. I keep breathing. I keep moving.

But I don’t get better.

I don’t find peace.

I just learn how to exist around the absence, the same way I’ve learned to ignore the hunger—acknowledging it, feeling it, and letting it stay.

You thought I’d be fine.

I’m not.

And I don’t think I ever will be.