The weight of your arm around me. My head finding that place against your chest where it somehow belongs. Your warmth beneath my cheek. The rise and fall of your breathing when neither of us has anything left to say.
I miss discovering whether we would have fit together as naturally in silence as we did in words.
It’s strange to miss a memory that doesn’t exist.
We had so many conversations. So many stories. We knew the landscapes of each other’s minds, wandered through them for years, and somehow I still never learned the simplest things.
What it felt like to sit beside you.
Whether your hand would find mine without thinking.
Whether we could spend an evening doing absolutely nothing and still feel like there was nowhere else we’d rather be.
I miss the tenderness that never had a body.
The intimacy that never had a room.
I miss the ordinary things we never got to discover.
Perhaps that’s the cruelest thing about possibility. The heart doesn’t always understand the difference between what happened and what it imagined so many times that it began to feel like memory.
So tonight, somewhere between remembering and dreaming, I can almost feel you beside me.
And for a moment, I let myself imagine it.
Not forever.
Not another life.
Just two people curled together in the quiet.
Finally in the same room.
Finally with nowhere else to be.
And then I open my eyes.
My arms are empty.
And I remember that some of the things we miss most are the things we never got to hold.
