I've archived you now.

Filed you away somewhere between lessons learned and scars I've stopped tracing in the dark. You occupy less space in my chest. Which feels like victory. Small. Shaky. But mine. I can say your name without my ribs contracting. Can hear your favourite song in grocery stores and only pause for a breath or two not the whole aisle like before, when I'd stand there among the cereal boxes, paralyzed, trying to remember if I still knew how to swallow. I suspect that healing is well. It’s less phoenix ascending from ash, all golden and reborn and sure. And more trembling butterfly, unfurling too soon. Wings still wet. Still stuck together. Testing air it doesn't trust yet. The butterfly doesn't know it was meant to fly. It only knows it can't go back to the safety of the cocoon that tomb, that womb, that thing that held it together while it fell completely apart. Did anyone ask the caterpillar if it wanted to become nothing first? To liquify completely every cell surrendering to chaos, losing every part of itself it knew, every certainty it crawled with just for the chance to fly? Because maybe the caterpillar would have said no. Maybe it would have chosen to stay earthbound, small and sure of itself, rather than dissolve into question. Rather than become all possibility and no answers. That's what you did. You dissolved me. Turned me into soup, into maybe, into who-am-I-without-you, a question I'm still answering in fragments. And I've been trying to remember my shape ever since. Piece by piece.

Some days I find a fragment the way I laugh at my own jokes again, the way I can drink my coffee black now instead of the way you took yours, the way I sleep diagonally across the whole bed like I'm reclaiming territory. Some days I'm all edges, nothing fits together. Some days I'm more scar tissue than skin. Some days I'm the caterpillar and the butterfly Both. neither and nothing, stuck between what I was and what I'm supposed to become. But butterflies, they live but for a few weeks. All that transformation, all that beautiful, terrible becoming just for a brief flight. And maybe that's the point. Maybe the question was never Will I survive you? but rather What will I become in the surviving?

I've archived you now.

You're there, yes in the way I flinch at tenderness, in the way I've learned to build walls with windows, in the way I know now that love can be both the liquifying and the wings. You occupy less space in my chest. But the space you left I'm learning to fill it with myself. With my own questions. My own answers. My own small, shaky, mine. And some days, when the light hits right, I swear I feel something flutter.