There's a strange stillness that follows something ending.
Not loud. Not tragic. Just… hollow. Like the air settles differently in a room that was once filled with laughter. Like a silence that's not empty, but too full of what used to be. That's where I am now. Not in love. Or maybe I am. You've left me confused. Definitely Not healed. Just existing in the afterlife of what we were. Once.
It's weird how something so vivid can blur so fast.
I still remember you, but softer now. Less color, more outlines.
You're not gone, but you're not exactly here either.
Like a dream I keep waking up from, but never fully forget.
People think the hardest part of heartbreak is the breaking itself —
The moment it all collapses.
But honestly?
It's the aftermath that wrecks you more.
The surviving. The quiet. The days after, when nothing happens but everything still hurts.
That's the real aftershock.
Because no one teaches you how to live after love. There's no guidebook for the mornings where you wake up without their name in your notifications.
No one tells you what to do with the photos —
Or the inside jokes.
Or the songs that now sound like funerals.
There's no burial for the living.
And that's what makes it worse.
But I know you're still out there.
Breathing.
Existing.
Smiling in someone else's messages maybe.
Maybe even laughing the same way you used to with me.
And yet, it feels like I'm mourning you.
Mourning us.
Like I'm stuck in the limbo that exists after the final text,
after the last voice note,
after the conversations start to rot from silence.
There's this version of me that still waits. Maybe it'll always wait.
Not actively. Not out loud.
Just quietly.
In the way I leave space in my mind for what I'd say to you.
In the way I hesitate before deleting a message thread.
In the way I still check your profile, less often now, but still.
Because some part of me thinks… maybe. Just maybe...
Maybe you feel it too.
Maybe somewhere, in the dead air between your day and night,
you think of me.
Not always. Maybe with longing, if I'm asking for too much.
Or just… enough to flinch.
Enough to remember.
Enough to wonder.
This is the after no one warned me about.
The conversations I still have with your absence.
The imaginary replies I hear when the real ones stopped coming.
The awkward way I laugh when someone asks me,
"So, what happened to that girl you always talked about?"
I just shrug.
Because how do you explain a ghost?
The world keeps moving like nothing happened.
Like love didn't live here.
Like you weren't the center of my everything for a while.
But I remember.
And that's the cruelest part of all —
That I remember too much,
while you remember less and less. Maybe not at all.
That I still grieve what you probably stopped missing long ago.
And yet… here I am.
Breathing.
Writing.
Existing.
Mourning.
This is what surviving love looks like.
Not a clean break.
Not a dramatic movie like ending.
Just the quiet survival that happens in the absence of closure. Whatever my mind can make up.
This isn't a love story anymore.
It's a postscript.
A footnote in a chapter you've already closed.
But for me?
It's the afterlife of us.
And I'm still learning how to live in it.
Because some days, I still slip. It keeps looping back.
I hear a song you once shared, and suddenly I'm back there — not just in memory, but in body.
My hands ache with the urge to text you. My chest gets tight in the way it used to when you were late to reply. And Heartbeat? Faster.
That old anxiety, like muscle memory.
Like grief with a timer that keeps resetting.
And I try not to spiral. I really do. But not that I can stop it!
I remind myself of how it ended — or didn't.
Because technically, it never really ended, did it?
There was no final goodbye.
No closure.
Just silence.
A silence I still sometimes answer in my head.
You Just let me go silently, like I never mattered anyway, right?
And what a cruel thing, to still carry a conversation with someone who's long stopped listening.
I catch myself building futures we'll never live in.
Imagining how you'd laugh at a joke I heard today, or how you'd roll your eyes at the way I overexplain everything when I'm nervous.
Even now, I still shape my reactions around the version of you that exists in my head.
Even now, I wonder what you'd think of the person I'm becoming.
Would you be proud?
Would you still see me as the one who tried? Or as a failure?
Because I did try.
God, I did. So damn hard.
I loved you with a kind of softness I didn't know I had in me.
And even when it all fell apart — slowly, then all at once — I kept trying to believe in the story of us.
Even if you stopped writing it halfway through.
And now, I think I'm just tired.
Tired of waiting for a message that isn't coming.
Tired of pretending the weight of your absence doesn't knock the breath out of me some nights.
Tired of carrying this love like a secret I no longer know what to do with.
Everyone keeps saying, "You'll move on."
But they don't understand —
I don't want to forget you.
I just want to not hurt like this anymore.
I want to reach a point where I can think of you without flinching.
Where memories don't sting.
Where I can pass by the places you touched in me and feel something warmer than grief.
But right now?
Right now, I still ache.
Not always loudly.
Maybe every day.
But it's enough to notice.
Enough to know that this?
This is the in-between.
The aftershock.
The afterglow.
The afterlife.
Where love used to live, and I'm still haunting it.
And I wonder—
If you ever visit it too.
Even for a moment.
Even once.
Do you ever think of me, like I still think of you?
Or am I the only one left standing in this ghost town of what we were?