It’s not ugly. It’s not a rant. Just, a closing. A gentle but firm ending of a chapter.
I write like I’m explaining something to someone I once loved and still respect enough to want them to walk away with their dignity intact.
Dear Chase,
I’ve tried a dozen times to figure out how to put words to the ending we never managed to give each other.
You were my first love. And for a long time, I thought you’d be my only. We grew up together in all the hardest ways, filling holes in each other that we never admitted out loud. I thought if I was steady enough, patient enough, strong enough,I could be everything you needed. Maybe I even thought saving you would prove I was worth saving, too.
But the truth is, we broke ourselves even more while trying to hold each other together.
I don’t regret us. Not one bit. I don’t regret the nights we laughed until it hurt or the quiet mornings when it felt like maybe we’d finally figured it out. I will carry those memories with me always. They’re stitched into my heart, forever.
But I can’t carry them and keep carrying you, too.
You’ve been weighed down with so much pain since you were a boy. Pain you never asked for and didn’t deserve. The parents who should have protected you left scars that never healed, and then they were taken from you. You and Trent were left to figure out survival in a world that wasn’t kind to either of you.
That wound has lived in you all these years, telling you that you weren’t enough, making you angry at yourself and everyone close enough to love you. And for too long, I stood as the primary target and outlet for that anger and pain, letting it chip away at me while I told myself it was my job to absorb it.
You used to come back to me because I wasyour home. I used to cling to you because being yours made me feel like I mattered. But I’ve learned that home isn’t supposed to hurt like that. It isn’t supposed to cost you your peace. And I finally know I can be whole without being your safe place to land.
So this is me letting go. Not because I stopped loving you, but because love shouldn’t feel like drowning. Not because you don’t deserve love, but because you deserve to find it without the weight of my expectations, and I deserve to live without the weight of your projections.
I hope you get help, Chase. Real help. The kind that can sit with the broken parts of you that you keep trying to bury under anger and bravado. Therapy. Counseling. Something that lets you name the pain instead of deflecting and allowing it to ricochet onto the people who love you most. You don’t have to keep living in survival mode. You don’t have to keep proving or posturing. You can heal. I believe that. I always have.
I hope you love your brother well. I hope you build something that lasts. I hope you give yourself the chance to stop running and finally rest in yourself. Because you are worthy of both love and healing.
This isn’t hate. This isn’t even goodbye with bitterness in it. It’s just the last page of ourstory. And I’m choosing to close it with gratitude for what we had, and with hope, for both of us, that we’ll be better for letting go.
Take care of yourself, Chase. Please.
All my love, Tori
TWENTY-EIGHT
TORI
It’s beenten days since I last saw him.
Ten days of silence that, oddly enough, felt necessary. The university shutting down over the holiday was its own kind of mercy. We both needed the space, the time to let the sting fade and the heat settle before either of us said something we couldn’t take back. He needed ten days to grieve such a tragic loss with his family.
But now that the days have stretched long and slow, I realize how much I’ve missed him. I didn’t expect that. I thought the distance would make it easier to draw a clean line of friendship in my heart, but instead, every quiet morning has reminded me of his smart mouth, every empty evening of how easily his presence filled a room.
I hate admitting it, even to myself, but he’s wound his way into the rhythm of my days, and without him, everything feels a little off-beat.
Tomorrow, campus opens once again. Tomorrow we go back to work, back to schedules and fluorescent lights and the constant shuffle of papers and people.
I’ve been telling myself I’m ready for that, but the truth is, Idon’t want our first words to happen under buzzing ceiling lights with the copier groaning in the background. I don’t want to face him for the first time in an office where anyone could walk past and watch.
So when the knock comes at my apartment door, I know. My heart knows before my brain can catch up.
I open it, and there he is.
Leo Euler. Jeans, a dark sweater, hair rumpled like his hands couldn’t leave it alone on the way over.
And his eyes—God, his eyes stop me. Not older, not exactly, but weighted in a way they weren’t before.
Grief does that. It sharpens, etches lines you don’t see until the light catches them. It puts years in your gaze you haven’t actually lived, and his carry all of it.
