3:47 AM
The Metronome of Insomnia
The darkness becomes a metronome for insomnia. Breath in. Breath out. Each exhale marking time I can't get back, moments that used to belong to you.
I lie here, eyes open, staring at nothing. The kind of nothing that somehow feels like everything. The kind of dark that doesn't hide the world—it reveals the parts of yourself you spend all day trying to bury.
Tracing Memories in the Dark
Slowly, slowly I am forgetting everything.
That face—the one I traced with my eyes until I could redraw it from memory in complete darkness. The small scar above your left eyebrow that you hated but I found impossibly endearing. The way your eyes crinkled when you laughed—not just smiled, but laughed, the kind that made strangers turn around and wonder what joy sounded like.
That voice. God, that voice. It could silence every screaming thought in my head with just one whispered word. "Hey."That's all you'd say sometimes. Just "hey," and my entire nervous system would stand down. The war inside me would ceasefire. Now I lie here trying to remember the exact pitch and the specific warmth, and I catch myself approximating. Filling in gaps with imagination rather than memory.
And you. Her. The person. You.
The Strangeness of Forgetting
Now even your mention doesn't hurt like before. That's the strangest part. Your name used to be a knife. Someone would say it in passing—a casual coincidence, a mutual friend's story—and I'd feel the blade twist. Now it's just... a word. A collection of letters that used to mean everything and now means something I can't quite name.
Your memories don't knock every night anymore. They used to arrive like clockwork—2 AM, 3 AM, whenever the world got quiet enough for my defenses to drop. Now they come less often. Sometimes days pass. Sometimes I realize I haven't thought about you in a whole twenty-four hours, and that realization itself becomes the thing that hurts.
Perhaps time did not apply ointment.
No, that would be too kind, too simple. Time didn't heal me. Time didn't gently bandage my wounds while I slept. What actually happened is stranger and crueler:
I just realized that it has silenced the pain.
Living with the Quiet
Not healed. Not resolved. Just... quieted. Like someone turned down the volume on a song that used to be deafening. The melody is still there, somewhere in the background, but I've learned to live with it playing.
Here's the strange thing, the thing I'm afraid to say out loud because no one would understand:
I am not forgetting her. I am forgetting the person whom I loved unconditionally.
I'm forgetting me.
The me who loved like that. The me who would have crossed oceans, who would have waited lifetimes, who believed—truly, madly, stupidly believed—that love was enough. That version of me, the one who existed before the first betrayal of hope, before the slow erosion of forever into "what we had"—I can feel him fading.
I am not afraid that she will not be remembered.
She'll be fine. She's probably sleeping peacefully right now, or laughing with someone new, or building a life that has nothing to do with the wreckage she left behind. That's not cruelty—that's just how healing works for some people. They move forward while we stand still, watching the horizon they disappeared behind.
I am afraid of the fact that even I will not remember one day.
One day I'll wake up and not remember how it felt to be consumed. To have someone become so essential to your existence that their absence feels like amputation. I'll forget the way it was so difficult to forget her.
I'll forget the difficulty.
And in forgetting that, I'll forget the most important part of myself—the part that proved I was capable of love so deep, so reckless, so devastatingly complete that losing it nearly destroyed me.
The Weight of Invisible Grief
4:12 AM
I speak into the darkness. No words, really. Just the shape of them. The inner voice saying something out loud, like a prayer, like a confession, like a last will and testament.
But there is no one to listen.
In the depth and dark of the night, I am the only witness to my own slow unraveling. The only one who knows that forgetting isn't freedom—it's a different kind of prison. One where the walls are made of fog, and you can't remember if you're escaping or just getting used to the cold.
I don't want to forget her.
But more than that—I don't want to forget us. Not who we were to each other. Not who I was because of her.
The person who wrote poetry at 3 AM.
The person who believed in forever.
The person who would have given everything, lost everything, and still called it a fair trade.
He's still in here somewhere. Underneath the scar tissue. Beneath the quiet acceptance. Behind the "I'm fine" and "It's been a while" and "I've moved on."
He's still in here, screaming into the void.
But the void doesn't answer. The void just absorbs. And slowly, slowly, even the screams become silence.
Finding Proof in the Pain
Maybe tomorrow I'll remember her less.
Maybe tomorrow the pain will be quieter still.
Maybe tomorrow I'll be one step closer to forgetting that it was ever so difficult to forget her.
And maybe that's not tragedy. Maybe that's just Tuesday.
But tonight, in the depth and dark, I hold onto the ache with both hands.
Because even the pain is proof.
Proof that once, I loved.
Proof that once, I was brave enough to give someone the power to destroy me.
Proof that once, I was alive in a way I'm not sure I'll ever be again.
4:34 AM
The night still presses. The silence still hums. And I still whisper into the black, my voice a vibration that no ear will receive, no heart will translate into feeling:
I remember. I remember. I remember.
Even though I can feel myself starting to forget.
A New Day, A New Silence
The sun rose. It always does. I made coffee, answered emails, and smiled at a stranger on the subway. No one knew that hours earlier I was drowning in the dark, writing eulogies for a version of myself that no longer exists. No one knew that I was saying goodbye.
That's the thing about grief—the invisible kind, the kind that's not for someone who died but for someone who simply... left. Who stopped choosing you? Who became a memory while you were still learning how to be alive without them?
No one brings you casseroles for this kind of grief.
No one sends flowers.
You just carry it. Silent. Heavy. Until one day you realize it's lighter, and you don't know when that happened, and you can't decide if that's relief or another loss.
I am forgetting.
But tonight, I wrote it down.
So at least the forgetting won't be total.
At least somewhere, in ink and pixels, is proof:
She existed. I loved. And for a while, it was everything.
— For everyone who has ever said goodbye to a ghost that still breathes.
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