Even Now, Still Always.

I still write about you. Not always in obvious ways. Sometimes you’re just the heaviness behind a line, the reason a sentence hits a little harder than it should. Sometimes you’re the quiet in between thoughts, the pause I take when the words won’t come. But you’re there. Somehow, you’re always there.

It’s strange how someone can leave and still live in everything. In how I see the world now, in the words I reach for, in the parts of me that only existed because you did. People think writing is how we let go, like if we pour it all onto the page, the hurt will drain out with it. But not everything is meant to be released. Some things stay. Some things become part of you.

You live in the poems I never share. In the ones I erase and rewrite a hundred times because no version ever feels enough. You live in the lines I can’t finish and the ones I whisper out loud just to feel like you’re listening. You’re in the spaces between what I say and what I mean. In the metaphors that only make sense to someone who knows the kind of love that ends but never leaves.

Maybe I still write about you because I never got to say everything. Or maybe it’s because the words are the only way I know how to keep you close. This isn’t about being stuck. I’ve grown. I’ve changed. But there’s a void now, a quiet space you left behind that nothing else seems to fit. I don’t carry you like a weight. I carry you like an emptiness that shaped me. An absence that still moves with me, no matter how far I go.

Some people become chapters. Others, a footnote. But you, you became the language, the muse, the ink.

You became the reason I write at all, and as long as I do, you’ll never really be gone.

Even now. Still always.