The mind is quieter now — not empty, because nothing ever truly empties, but quieter in a way that makes the tiny things loud. The threads on the app; they are all small monuments to habits I thought would be permanent.

I keep hearing myself say, in memory, I’ll do it soon. Later became a room I never entered. I told myself I’d say the compliments when they mattered, that I would make space when I saw the exhaustion in your face, that I would trade ambition for presence when the moment asked for it. I thought the scaffolding of love could survive deferred tenderness. I was so wrong.

Maybe I didn’t love you as often as I could have. I can write that line and feel my chest tighten because it is not an accusation; it’s a ledger I carry. I remember the days; the silly messages; the small laugh you tried to hide. I remember thinking, later, as if love could be queued like emails that I would attend to when you and I had more bandwidth. Those small denials of attention stacked like stones until they became a wall neither of us knew how to climb.

We were not torn apart by anger or betrayal. There was no thunderclap. We were undone by maps that started to look different the longer we traced them. You wanted a life that anchored in a place, in family or a slower rhythm. I wanted a life that moved to different cities, different mornings. Neither of us was wrong. Both of us were right in our own hunger. The cruelty is that love did not erase that hunger. Love lived in the space between, soft and real, but not enough to redirect our compasses.

Saying goodbye under those terms felt like learning a new language of grief. There is no scandal to rehearse; there is only the slow, precise work of naming what diverged. We each heard the other and smiled, and neither of us understood how we were saying the same word with different meanings.

Saying sorry for the small cruelties that are not dramatic enough to be noticed but large enough to be felt. For the texts I didn’t send. For the times I listened but did not hear. I am sorry that I treated love like a trophy and not like daily work. Saying I’m sorry I was blind feels like both confession and confession’s failure: admission without the power to rebuild.

Sometimes I fantasize about what a second chance would look like. I imagine the simple things: the morning message that says I saw you , the hand that finds yours in a crowded room, the decision to choose rest with someone rather than achievement alone. But then I wake to the honest shape of us; two people who will not be the same person in five years; and I understand that a second chance, if it is given, must be forged from different choices, not rehearsed apologies.

What this break has taught me, painfully and gratefully, is the difference between feeling and doing. Thought without action is a kind of cruelty. Loving someone in memory while failing them in presence is a particular form of selfishness dressed as nostalgia. If I have any humility left, it is the ability to name that failing and let it shape how I live from here.

I will carry you in the small ways that haunt me: a song that comes on at the wrong time, a joke that lands too late, the echo of your laugh in a room I thought I had emptied. I will carry the gratitude for who you were to me and the instruction for how not to love in the future. I will try; clumsily and with shame and with hope; to say the small things while there is still time.

This is not about forgiveness but owning the quiet truth that I was always thinking of you, but I was not always acting like it mattered. That truth sits with me like a weight I did not deserve to carry and now must learn from. If loving you was a mistake, it was a beautiful one. If letting you go was sorrow, it was also an act of respect for the futures we could not share.

I hope you find the life that fits the map you drew. I hope it brings you mornings that feel like home. And if memory is a kind thing, may it keep us both gentle.

Life has a strange sense of timing. The very night we (or maybe just I) chose to walk different roads happened to be the night It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia aired its Season 17 finale. And instead of the usual absurd comedy I count on, it closed with Willie’s voice — a song turned elegy for Charlie’s mom. It felt less like coincidence and more like the universe winking, reminding me that endings rarely arrive alone. Talk about cosmic conspiracy!