There’s a quiet violence in realizing someone who once held your whole inner world now lives outside the borders of your life.

Not gone,
not erased,
just… unreachable.

It happens slowly at first, an unanswered message, a silence between breaths, a day where you don’t think of them until night.
And then it happens all at once, the way seasons change when you weren’t watching.
Suddenly this person who was once your gravity becomes a name you hesitate to say out loud.

People talk about moving on like it’s a choice.
Artists know better.
We don’t “move on”; we carry.
We learn to walk with the memory without letting it drag us to the ground.

And yet, there are those moments that ambush us.
A song that used to be yours.
A familiar shade of blue.
A street corner where you once laughed so hard you forgot the world was cruel.
And the truth returns: you never really stopped orbiting them.
You only learned to pretend you weren’t.

Do we ever forget the birthdays?
The firsts?
The small rituals that made the ordinary feel lit from within?
I don’t think so.
I think the heart remembers everything, even the things we forbid it to say.

Some loves never leave; they simply learn to live elsewhere.

I used to believe that we outgrow people.
Now I think we transform around them.
Like two universes brushing past each other not enough to merge, not enough to destroy, but enough to change the shape of the sky forever.

And what do we do with that change?
Some of us become quieter.
Some become braver.
Some become artists because there is no other way to survive the things we cannot name.

The truth is simple, painful, and strangely beautiful:
we all start as strangers, we fall into each other’s lives like destiny, and eventually we are asked to return to the place we began.
But we never return as who we were.

There is always a tenderness we can’t unlearn,
a bruise that turned into a doorway,
a memory we keep hidden because saying it aloud would make the room feel smaller.

We don’t choose who becomes a stranger again.
The heart makes that decision for us,
quietly,
grievingly,
in its own time.

What we can choose is who we become after the silence has settled,
after the universe expands again,
after we realize that losing someone doesn’t mean the love was a mistake.

It means the love was real.

And real things leave marks.