The mind is quieter now and not empty because nothing ever truly empties but quieter in a way that makes the tiny things loud. I keep hearing myself say in memory that I will do it soon and later became a room I never entered because I told myself I would say the compliments when they mattered and I would make space when I saw the exhaustion in your face and I would trade ambition for presence when the moment asked for it but I thought the scaffolding of love could survive deferred tenderness and I was so wrong.

Maybe I did not love you as often as I could have and I can write that line and feel my chest tighten because it is not an accusation but a ledger I carry. I remember the silly messages and the small laugh you tried to hide and I remember thinking later as if love could be queued like emails that I would attend to when we had more bandwidth and 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 and there was no thunderclap because we were undone by maps that started to look different the longer we traced them and you wanted a life that anchored in a place and I wanted a life that moved to different cities and neither of us was wrong and love did not erase that hunger because it lived in the space between us soft and real but not enough to redirect our compasses.

Saying goodbye under those terms felt like learning a new language of grief because there is no scandal to rehearse and there is only the slow precise work of naming what diverged and we each heard the other and smiled and neither of us understood how we were saying the same word with different meanings. I am sorry for the texts I did not send and for the times I listened but did not hear and for treating love like a trophy instead of daily work because thought without action is a kind of cruelty and loving someone in memory while failing them in presence is a particular form of selfishness dressed as nostalgia.

I will carry you in the small ways that haunt me like a song that comes on at the wrong time or a joke that lands too late or the echo of your laugh in a room I thought I had emptied and I will try clumsily and with shame and with hope to say the small things while there is still time. I hope you find the life that fits the map you drew and I hope it brings you mornings that feel like home and if memory is a kind thing may it keep us both gentle.

Share your thoughts with me on Twitter. I am @troysk704.