Lately, it feels like I’ve been walking through a house where every floorboard creaks with memory. The kind of house where no door truly closes, where ghosts don’t rattle chains; they breathe down your neck with familiar perfume and timing too perfect to be coincidental.

I’m not actively reaching backward, not anymore. I don’t have hands outstretched, begging the past to return. But somehow, it still lingers. Soft taps on the windowpane of my life. Flickers of headlights that match a car I used to know too well. A name dropped in passing, a time on the clock that repeats too often to ignore. The kind of signs that feel like fingerprints on a mirror you just wiped clean.

It’s strange, how I don’t feel tethered to him anymore, but I still flinch when the wind moves like he used to. My chest tightens, but it’s not longing; it’s muscle memory. I used to ache for him. Now I just brace for impact.

There’s another presence now. A new character in this half-written chapter. He doesn’t demand space in my mind, not yet. But he brushes past thoughts of the others in ways that make me pause. There’s something easy about it, but also something eerily reminiscent. He reminds me of a silhouette I’ve already survived. And that makes me hesitate.

I’m trying to exist in this delicate in-between: not craving love, but craving connection. Not looking for ownership, just presence. Just someone who lingers a little. Someone who stays long enough to make me feel seen, but not long enough to carve their name into my ribs.

It’s not that I’m scared of intimacy; it’s that I’ve memorized the pattern. The sweet beginning, the slow unravel. I’ve been handed promises dressed like apologies and kisses that tasted like goodbye. I’ve mistaken lust for comfort. I’ve called chaos passion. I don’t want to do that again.

And still, the signs keep showing up. He keeps showing up. Not in flesh, but in symbols. Like the universe is playing a cruel game of charades, and I’m forced to guess: Is it coincidence? Or is it him reaching out without reaching out?

I don’t want to play anymore. I don’t want to decode breadcrumbs from a man who left the table a long time ago. But it’s hard not to notice when the music shifts, and it’s the song we once lived inside. Or when the time on the clock looks like the date everything changed.

I’ve cried over things I can’t explain. Flashes of metal and wheels that mimic memories. Messages that never arrive, but still feel sent. It’s not grief. It’s the exhaustion of being haunted by something you’ve finally let go of;…only to have it circle back like smoke, just when you’ve learned to breathe again.

I don’t miss him. I miss who I thought he could be. I miss who I was when I believed in that version of him.

And maybe that’s what this is: a funeral for a future that never came.

So I’m holding space for my softness. I’m guarding the pieces of me that used to break so easily. I’m not chasing anymore; not him, not validation, not even clarity. If answers come, they’ll have to find me here; where I’m finally learning to sit still with the echoes and not invite them in.