“Hey, how have you been?”

Maybe you’re curious. Maybe you miss me. Maybe you want to just know if I’ve moved on yet. Maybe you wonder if I’ll answer.

It’s the single text I’ve been waiting for, for so long. Just a few words. I don’t answer too quickly because I don’t want you to know I’ve been sitting by my phone hoping to hear from you.

I’m coy with how to respond because I don’t want to seem desperate. So I try and play it cool like this conversation isn’t making my heart flip in a hundred different ways. Like every time my phone makes any movement, I jump.

So I say fine and ask how you are and we go back and forth with a casual conversation. I wanted to hear from you but nothing is being said. At least nothing I wanted to hear.

“I miss you.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I still care.”

And if I were to answer that question honestly, I don’t think you’d want to know the truth.

Because the truth is I haven’t slept in weeks and on the rare chance I do, I wake up at 3 am staring at the ceiling.

The truth is there are days I’m not even hungry because every other feeling completely consumes me far more than hunger pains.

The truth is my favorite part of the day is when I’m sleeping and not thinking about you.

The truth is I’m out of tears to cry over you.

The truth is I reach for my phone every morning, hoping today will be the day you come back into my life and my heart can heal. But I look at my phone with a hundred notifications. None being you.

I wake up and I’m exhausted. And I just want to go back to sleep.

The truth is I pretend to be doing well. But it takes everything in me to get out of bed some mornings and look presentable.

It takes everything in me to look at everyone and smile even though my heart is completely breaking.

And I can’t talk to anyone about it because everyone is tired of hearing your name and everyone thinks I should be over it by now.

My friends try to introduce me to people when we are out and I smile and engage in conversation and I really appreciate what they are doing, to try and get me to heal but the truth is I feel like a ghost of myself simply going through the motions.

And I don’t know what I can even offer anyone else because I feel so empty inside.

In everyone I meet, I look for you and every one of them seems to fall short of my expectations.

I see you everywhere. In the songs, I listen to. In the books, I read. In the shows I watch. In the news, I wish I could tell you of something good that just happened.

I don’t know how to fall out of love with you. And everything about you hurts me. It hurts when you’re here and it hurts when you’re gone.

So you ask how I am and the honest truth is I’m lost without you here because so much of who I was, was because of you. So much of my happiness came down to you.

And I know someone shouldn’t have that much of an influence on me and my life. I should be more whole than that. I should be stronger. I should be able to just move on.

But I won’t tell you any of these things. If I told you I was falling apart in your absence, that’d just give you the satisfaction of knowing you made the right choice leaving.

I might feel weak right now but I have a little more pride than that.

So we’ll carry on with a conversation like it isn’t bothering me at all.

And you’ll watch a news feed as I smile big. And you’re going to think I’m over it.

But the honest truth is I’m completely emotionally and physically drained pretending that losing you wasn’t the worst thing to ever happen to me.

So I’ll say fine. But nothing about me is fine.