Please Don’t Wait For Me.

I think he is still there.

He has always been.

Not physically, not in any literal sense, but around. Present in the pauses between our conversations, in the songs I skip because they carry too much weight. He shows up in the way I hesitate before replying to a kind message, or how I reach for the phone when something good or terrible happens, before remembering we don’t talk like that anymore. We never really did, not constantly, not daily, but when we did, it meant something. Even if neither of us ever said so out loud.

It’s strange to explain him to people. There’s no neat label. No clean timeline. It wasn’t a relationship. It wasn’t a fling. It wasn’t even love, not officially. But he’s been in every chapter. I have known him through versions of myself I barely recognize now. He has seen me at nineteen, laughing too loudly at the wrong things; at twenty-four, unraveling quietly in a job I hated; at thirty, chasing dreams I wasn’t sure were mine.

I am thirty-two now and somehow, through all of it, he’s stayed. Not beside me, but nearby. Always nearby. Like some quiet proof that someone could care for you across distances, across years, across choices that never included them.

I have been trying to say it.

To say, don’t wait for me.

I see you.

You are always just a little too close, just out of reach, holding onto a shadow of what we were, or what we never quite became. I want to tell you I will come around. That I will be ready eventually. But the truth is, I don’t even know what readiness feels like anymore. The places I live in now are unfamiliar, dim. I have become someone who survives more than she arrives. And you, you have always been light. Steady. Soft in ways I still don’t believe I deserve. I worry I will only burn in your warmth, or worse, put it out completely. So don’t wait for me, even if you are still hoping I will say something different.

Don’t wait for me.

I have carried too many mistakes, like loose stones in every coat pocket. Some I earned. Some I inherited. But they follow me, quietly, and they have made a home between the space we used to share. I am not who I was. And the woman you once knew, the one who called you from a junction in the rain, smiling like the world hadn’t hurt her yet — she’s long gone. You’d still find pieces of her in me, I think. But they are quieter now. Worn thin. The colors don’t shine like they used to.

You always knew how to see me when I couldn’t see myself. You never asked me to be more than what I was, even when what I was looked like a mess of unfinished thoughts and sudden exits. That Tuesday night — the one in your car — we didn’t speak. You just played some old album I didn’t recognize, and I cried without asking why. You let me. You always let me. Not everyone does that. Most people try to fix things. You didn’t. You just stayed. And that stayed with me.

Don’t wait for me.

I don’t say that lightly. I know you don’t wait with so much expectation, you never have. But there’s a part of you, quiet and stubborn, that still holds a space for me. I feel it. I have always felt it. It shows up in your silence, in the links you send me with no context, in the way you remember every small thing I forget. I want to say thank you. I want to say I love you in the way people love ghosts, not because they want them back, but because they never really left. But even that feels selfish.

What is this?

Is this a letter?

No.

This isn’t a letter. Not really. It’s just me doing what I have always done — writing around you because I never had the courage to write to you. And maybe that’s what hurts the most. That I have just spent minutes telling the world about a love I never let happen. That the one person who saw me through every version of myself… will only ever meet me like this.

Here.

Between these lines.

Never all at once.

Never fully.

Never enough.

Please….Don’t wait.