She loved you like she was running out of time. Like the world was ending, and she wanted to leave fingerprints on your soul before it did. She never did anything halfway – she laughed with her whole body, kissed like she was writing poetry with her mouth, cried like she was trying to drown the hurt before it drowned her first.
(She never let you see her cry. She only let you see what she wanted you to remember.)
Some people leave like a slow fade – like the dimming of a streetlight in the distance. They dissolve into the background of your life, their absence becoming nothing more than a change in scenery.
But she? She didn’t disappear. She became the echo in every empty room. The unfinished sentence at the edge of your tongue. She was in the way your hands hesitated before touching someone new, in the way your body still leaned toward the ghost of her warmth. She was never just a memory – she was muscle memory, imprinted into you like a reflex you never learned how to unlearn.
She wasn’t perfect. She was reckless and radiant, always caught between staying and running. The kind of woman who made you believe that love could defy gravity. That if you held on tight enough, neither of you would ever have to fall. But when she left, she didn’t just take herself – she took the air, the sky, the feeling of weightlessness that had made you forget what it was like to stand on solid ground.
And now, no matter how much time passes, you still catch yourself reaching for something that isn’t there.
And you tried. You told yourself love like that doesn’t last. That it was meant to be fleeting, that some people are just passing storms, meant to knock the wind out of you before moving on. But tell me – how do you let go of someone who still lingers in the way you laugh? Who still lives in the spaces between your ribs? How do you forget a love that changed the way you pronounce your own name?
Loss doesn’t ask permission before it remakes you. It doesn’t care who you were before, doesn’t give you a choice in who you’ll be after. You can call that healing if you want, but sometimes healing just means learning to carry the ache without letting it drown you.
Some people teach you how to move on.
She taught you that even pain can hold a pulse, that even loss can keep you breathing.
Source: Annaya Mahale
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