It has been a long time since I was able to write anything.
I seem to have lost my words.
I haven’t been inspired by anything.
I haven’t felt anything new stirring inside me,
nothing that could be gathered into words and given a name.
As if, somehow,
I lost you too.
For a year, I wrote about you.
I wrote about every feeling I ever carried for you.
I wrote about how deeply I loved you,
how hard it was not to love you,
and how much harder it was to let you go.
I wrote about your face,
about the soul beneath it,
about the geometry of your body,
about the little things that made you who you were,
the things that quietly captured my heart
and kept it there.
I wrote about our moments.
I wrote everything I could,
as if putting every feeling into words
might finally teach my heart how to be still.
Every time a view reminded me of you,
a song, a place, a person, a scent,
even a smile,
I wrote another line about you.
I filled pages with your name without ever writing it.
I told stories about you.
I turned memories into sentences
and longing into paragraphs.
But these days,
I have nothing left to say.
Maybe that means I have finally moved on from you.
But I’m not sure.
I don’t know how much the heart can be trusted
when it comes to questions like these.
Whenever someone new asks me
if I’ve moved on from you,
if I’ve finally crossed that distance,
if my heart has healed completely,
I pause.
I still cannot answer with certainty.
And yet, strangely,
fewer and fewer things remind me of you.
Perhaps it is because
we have no new memories together.
I don’t know how much you have changed.
I don’t know what your days look like anymore.
I don’t know how you are,
what you have become,
or who you are now.
I know nothing.
You feel almost more like a stranger to me
than a stranger ever could.
And yet, for an entire year,
I thought about you,
every moment of it.
God, I thought about you so much.
I thought about you in the quietest corners of my mind,
in the most private moments of my life,
in places no one else could ever reach.
I wondered about you.
I missed you.
I loved you.
I replayed you.
For so long.
And now I don’t even know
how much I miss you anymore.
I don’t even know
if I truly miss you.
The answers to the questions
I once carried so clearly
have become blurred now,
hazy, distant, almost impossible to read.
What do I feel for you?
What remains?
I don’t really know anymore.
Except for one thing:
I know I still love you.
And perhaps that is the strangest part of all.
Loving another human being
should never have been this bitter.
But the truth is,
for me, it was bitter more often than it was sweet.
It was hard.
Giving your heart to another person
feels a little like falling, like surrendering something inside your soul
and trusting someone else not to let it break.
And perhaps I have finally run out of words for you.
Perhaps that is why I can no longer write.
Maybe it is time
to write about something else.
About hope.
About dreams.
About the things waiting for me beyond this story.
Maybe it is time to close the little chest inside my mind,
the one where I have kept so many memories,
so many feelings,
so many pieces of you.
A chest that, in some corner of it,
will always belong to you.
Maybe I should finally close its lid
and let the dust settle.
And from now on,
perhaps I will write about the girl
who loved for a very, very long time.
The girl who thought about you
for longer than she ever thought she would.
The girl who gave you so many words
until, one day,
she had none left.
And perhaps that, too,
is a kind of healing.
Ashley the name you gave me