The room was a mess of boxes and half-folded clothes.
Old receipts, tangled chargers, memories I didn't know I still had.
Isla sat cross-legged on the floor, folding shirts with the kind of care only best friends bother with. She picked up a photo from the pile — me at my old office desk, hair curled, smile too wide, too hopeful.
"You were already falling, weren't you?" she asked, holding it up.
I didn't look at the photo. I didn't need to. I remembered exactly how I felt that day.
"Yeah," I said quietly.
She didn't push. Just kept folding.
"And now?" she asked after a beat.
I shrugged, stuffing a sweater into a box. "Still falling. Just… in a different direction."
Isla nodded like she understood something I hadn't said out loud.
"Then let's pack the parachute this time."
I smiled, small and tired.
Because that's the thing about Isla — she never tries to fix me.
She just makes sure I land softer.
I decided to leave.
Not because I stopped loving him.
But because I finally understood —
he would never love me the way I needed to be loved.
So, I disappeared.
I didn't make a scene. Didn't slam doors or write goodbye letters.
I just stopped showing up.
I resigned from the job with a short, dry email. I handed in my ID, cleared my desk, and left my keycard in a drawer. No lunch send-off. No announcement. Only a few confused glances, and Jace staring after me with a kind of sadness I couldn't return.
The city had turned into a haunted place anyway — full of places where we used to breathe the same air.
The café where we laughed too loudly.
The fire exit where he found me crying.
The elevator ride that changed everything.
All of it felt like walking through a graveyard of things that were once alive.
I packed what I could fit in a car and moved south. A quieter place. Smaller. One without the shadow of him around every corner.
I blocked him from everything.
Phone. Socials. Even his Spotify account, which I once saved offline so I could fall asleep to the playlist he made for me. Gone.
I deleted every possible door he could use to walk back into my life.
There was no map left for him.
No trail. No hint.
He would never find me again.
And he would never be able to break me again.
Later that night, after the boxes were taped shut and the silence had settled in, my phone buzzed.
A voice message from Isla.
I pressed play, curled up on the floor with my back against the wall, the kind of tiredness that wasn't just physical.
Her voice came through soft, steady — like she knew I needed it to be.
"Hey… just wanted to say — I'm proud of you.
Even if your heart still aches, you don't stay small.
You didn't disappear into the waiting.
And maybe that's what healing looks like —
not forgetting them,
but remembering yourself better."
I didn't cry.
Not this time.
I just closed my eyes and let her words settle in the quiet.
Like a hand on my back.
Like a light left on.
The first few weeks were brutal.
I was shaking all the time. Not from sadness — from withdrawal.
Like I had ripped myself away from something sacred.
Like my soul was detoxing from a drug that had once felt like home.
I barely ate. Barely spoke.
And every time the wind changed; I thought I heard his voice in it.
But pain has a strange way of teaching you how to breathe differently.
And slowly… I did.
I started waking up without checking my phone.
I stopped rereading our old messages.
I started choosing silence over hope.
I told myself I was better.
And some days, I even believed it.
Then the dreams returned.
Not like before.
They were quieter. Less vivid. But heavier.
They came like whispers — not memories, not visions, just feelings shaped into stories.
The first one came a month after I left.
We were sitting on a mountaintop, just the two of us.
The stars above us began to fall, one by one, like a slow rain made of fire and light.
He reached for my hand and held it like it was the only thing keeping him alive.
"I'm sorry," he said.
I woke up with my pillow soaked through, and my chest aching like I'd just buried him again.
A year passed.
I had a new number. A new life.
I worked remotely now, painting in the afternoons, and drinking coffee with strangers who didn't know my past.
My hair was longer. My laughter was quieter.
Sometimes people asked if I was seeing anyone.
"No," I'd say with a smile. "I'm still waiting to feel something real."
What I didn't say was:
"I still dream about a man who chose someone else."
I still wake up some nights gripping my sheets like they were his shirt.
That every time I close my eyes, he finds me again —
on beaches, in rainstorms, in temples carved into the sides of forgotten mountains.
He always finds me.
But he never stays.
Two years passed.
I picked up hobbies. Yoga. Oil painting. Long walks at dawn.
I tried to let my days fill with sounds that didn't remind me of him.
But the dreams didn't stop.
This time, we lived in a house he built in the woods.
With his bare hands, he crafted it beam by beam.
We cooked rice over the fire. We laughed into each other's shoulders.
He didn't say he loved me.
He didn't have to.
I woke up and cried until morning,
because that kind of peace —
that kind of life —
wasn't mine in this one.
Three years passed.
I got stronger.
The crying slowed.
The aching grew quieter.
I even let myself go on dates. Casual, easy things.
But no one's hand ever felt like his.
And every time someone tried to reach my heart, I remembered how he lived there first.
I stopped letting people in.
Not because I was bitter.
But because my soul had grown tired.
Not from loving him…
But from doing it alone.
Four years passed.
He never came back.
Not in life.
But in dreams —
He came more than ever.
Some nights we were young again, running through fields with our fingers locked together like children chasing the moon.
Other nights, I was a noblewoman, and he was a soldier leaving me on horseback, promising: "I'll find you in every lifetime."
And he did.
He found me again and again —
in deserts, in floods, on warships, in past lives wrapped in silence.
But we always lost each other.
Every dream ended the same:
I woke up alone.
Every morning felt like mourning.
People ask me now,
Why didn't you settle down?
And I want to say:
Because I belong to someone who never fully belonged to me.
But I don't say that.
I just smile.
And say I'm still waiting to feel something real.
The truth is,
I don't think I'll ever stop loving him.
Not in this lifetime.
But maybe in the next,
He'll remember me sooner.
He'll choose me faster.
He'll stay.
Until then,
He lives in my dreams.
And I live in the ache of almost