You said you needed space. I didn't know I'd become the empty part. That you meant the kind of s p a c e where nothing grows, where even light bends away from itself.

Did you know you left me weightless? Which, is not the same as free. Even gravity understands: everything letting go is still a kind of pull. Now it's just the echo of It's not you, it's physics. As if entropy were kinder than the truth.

I tried to stay civilized. Bought a plant. Named it after you. It died quietly, loyal to the theme.

I returned to philosophy as if meaning were a muscle I could rebuild one citation at a time. Camus told me to imagine Sisyphus happy. I told him to ..mind his own rock.

I downloaded three mindfulness apps. None were mindful enough.. to stop asking for a subscription. Enlightenment, apparently, is £9.99/month, billed annually for the committed.

I deleted our photos. Emptied the trash folder. Then Googled: how to recover deleted photos. Turns out closure has a 14-day undo option, a grace period for the faithless.

Friends said time heals. But time just reorganizes the ache alphabetizes loss, curates the wreckage, makes a museum out of maybe.

I rehearse what I'd say if you came back: something cool, restrained, like We were a necessary entropy, a second law neither of us could repeal.

But truthfully, I'd just ask if you ever think of me when something beautiful ends.

Because I do. Every time.

I tell myself it's growth. That I'm fine now in the way Wi-Fi is fine, technically connected, mostly functional, occasionally dropping signal for no reason at all.

Maybe that's progress: I only quote dead philosophers ..half as often.

I've stopped naming plants after people. I've learned that some questions don't want answers, just audience.

If that's not healing, it's at least good comic timing the kind that comes from knowing the punchline is always: and yet, here we are. still turning loss into language, still mistaking metaphor for medicine.

The ache has a shape now. It fits in my pocket. I carry it like spare change, like something I might need later, like proof I was here, like proof you were too.