They used to talk until the night faded into morning. Now the phone stays silent, and the silence feels heavier than any words could. He told himself a hundred times to stop checking if the other was online, to stop waiting for a reply that would never come. Every reminder of him his favorite song, the way he laughed cut deeper than the first goodbye.
He thought letting go would be a clean break, but it wasn't. It was dragging his heart out piece by piece, pretending not to care when he cared too much. People said time would heal, but they never warned him about the hours that feel endless when you're teaching yourself not to love someone who still lives inside you.
And in the quiet, he whispered the hardest truth: sometimes moving on doesn't mean you stopped loving, it just means you learned to keep the love without letting it break you anymore.