He doesn’t just miss her—he’s haunted by her, possessed by every inch of memory that still clings to his soul like a scent he can’t wash off.And there’s something about that kind of devotion—violent in its intensity, sacred in its silence—that makes me ache.
I shouldn’t feel this.
I shouldn’t crave this connection to a stranger who clearly belongs to someone else in every way that matters.But here I am.Sitting in the dark, hunched over my laptop with my pulse thudding, wondering how a man can write like this and not mean it with every goddamn piece of himself.
I want to ask him so many things, and the questions pulse at my fingertips, desperate to be released, but I don’t dare type them.At least not now.
Not when they sound so fragile and jagged in my head.
Why did you leave her if she was everything?
Why did you walk away if she made you feel like home, like the only place you ever belonged?Or let her walk away?
Why did it fall apart when it sounds like she held the most tender, most dangerous parts of you with a touch so precise, so devastatingly intimate, it felt like you two were born just to love each other—like she was made to hold every jagged piece without cutting herself?
Why did it end, and how do you live with it every day without clawing at your chest?
And maybe the most challenging question—the one I keep swallowing down until it turns bitter at the back of my throat—is this: Why can’t I find someone to love me like that?
Why has no one ever unraveled me, stripped me bare, or made me feel like I’m more than just convenient, more than background noise in someone else’s love story?
I want to be seen like that.I want to feel like that.I want someone who loves me to the point of losing himself, someone who wants to fuck me like I’m oxygen and also hold me like I might disappear mid-kiss.
Someone who can’t help but write songs about the way my body hums under his touch, about the sound I make when I come undone, about the way I bury my face in his neck after.
I want to tell him—this stranger with lyrical scars and guitar strings for veins—that the fear he’s trying to outrun isn’t weakness.It’s the aftermath of something special and perfect.It’s what happens when you let someone in so far that they become your reflection, and suddenly you can’t separate your rhythm from theirs or tell whose heartbeat is echoing in your ears when you wake up alone.
He loved her to the point of erasing the outlines of himself, and now he’s terrified that no matter how far he runs, parts of him are still hers, still caught in her laugh, in the sheets they shared, in every note he plays when he thinks no one’s listening.
There’s so much I want to say to him.
But I sit still, fingers grazing the keys without pressing them down, my mind flooded with his words and the sting of everything I’ll never ask—or feel.
Is it crazy to be jealous?
He’s had something so precious, and I ...I had a broken heart, and I had so many bad experiences that I didn’t want to fall in love again.Even though some days I wish for it.
This guy is very much like me in some ways.I had a sense that he knew music—not just knew it as people often say, but understood it, felt it deep in his marrow.There was something in the way he paused, the rhythm of his sentences, the cadence of his silence.But now I am certain—this man doesn’t just play music.He creates it.He pours himself into it.He allows it to consume him, reshape him, and break him.I suspect his lyrics aren’t just written—they’re confessions.His guitar is probably more than an instrument.It’s a confessional booth and his salvation.
This guy would eventually make me fall at some point because he speaks my language, and ...break my heart because he’s already taken.
I should close the computer, take a breath, shut the screen, and let this fade into the background like all the other near-misses and almost conversations that never make it past 2 a.m.
Yep.I should do the smart thing.I should create a new username, disappear into a new persona, pretend this connection never happened.Pretend I didn’t feel something curl low in my belly, hot and hungry, when he described the way she broke him open.Pretend this isn’t some reckless craving built on lies and projection and the kind of lust that lives in the silence between responses.
But I don’t move.
Because the truth is, if I shut the computer now, if I end this—I’ll feel the silence creep back in.I’ll feel alone again.
Not the loneliness that comes from being unattached, from not having someone to kiss goodnight.This is the sort that lives in your marrow, that hums beneath the surface even in a crowded room.It whispers that you’re forgettable, that you blend too easily into the background, that no one sees you long enough to stay.
That no one ever will.
And this man—this digital phantom I shouldn’t trust, whose words might be just performance, pain, or poetry—he makes me feel alive in a way that terrifies me.Not because I believe him.But because some part of me wants to.Even if this is a lie, even if it’s make-believe and will dissolve the second the screen goes black, I still feel more real in this moment than I have in months.And today I don’t want to let go of that just yet.
ChapterTwenty-One
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