I recognise this café. I’ve been here before.
I think I’m about to get that letter.
Or maybe I already have.
I remember it ended on a Tuesday.
This feels like a Tuesday.
But that might be memory talking.
Or muscle.
Her letter will be kind. Final.
The kind of kindness that makes you bleed slower.
A long letter on a short piece of paper.
I haven’t read it yet.
But I remember what it says.
I’ll read it and know two things at once:
That it’s over.
And that it had ended many times before…
we just kept forgetting.
Or maybe it hasn’t happened yet.
Wait. What day is it today?
These clothes…
I remember wearing them the day I sat here, before her letter arrived.
So maybe it’s today.
Maybe this is the hour just before.
Soon, her letter will say everything… quietly, completely.
I remember that part well.
The part where she pulls away.
The part where I stay.
I’ll be left holding the silence.
In an hour, I’ll know: there’s no room for hope.
No ellipsis.
Just a full stop.
I’ll be very tired after reading it.
But calm.
Too calm, maybe.
I’ll leave myself something…
just a line, scratched into the table.
Wait.
It’s already there.
The pen stroke is mine.
This means I read her letter here last week.
Not today.
Because there they are, my familiar handwriting
‘I guess that’s that,’ it says.
—
Time is strange now.
I live in folds. I wake up in fragments.
It’s a room I keep walking into by mistake.
This morning, I opened my eyes and spent a while trying to figure out what year it was.
Sometimes I think she just left me.
Sometimes I wake and it’s years before I ever knew her name.
Sometimes I’m holding her hand in a memory that never quite existed…
a day that never landed.
I’m looking at Possession, by A.S. Byatt. It’s on my shelf.
The spine is familiar, still new.
My bookmark is halfway through.
Which means I’ve woken up in a time before I finished it.
And it’ll be years before I meet her.
But somehow, I remember finishing it.
And how it opened a door inside me.
A quiet ache I didn’t yet have a name for.
Because that’s what the novel does… it teaches you how to break, elegantly.
Ash and LaMotte wrote themselves into each other, across poems, across time.
They never lived their love
not in daylight, not with names on mailboxes.
But they wrote it. They felt it. And so, it existed.
That was enough.
That’s the kind of love I had too.
Not the kind you hold, but the kind that stays behind.
She and I never had a beginning.
We had middles. Fractured, beautiful middles.
Maybe-laters. Almosts. Long silences and brief, unspoken truths.
We were always in the margins.
Always asterisks, never headlines.
We had moments though.
Glances, tucked between laughter and the silence that followed.
An intimacy I didn’t know I could feel.
A love that made me want to be better.
That meant more than anything that came after.
When she left me the letter,
Possession came back to me like a prophecy I hadn’t understood.
Like a book that had always known.
But none of this has happened yet.
And yet the ache is already here.
Older than she is.
As if the novel broke my heart retroactively.
As if some part of me always knew…
That someone would come
and love me in a way that would leave me soft and fractured.
And that I would carry her absence
like a story I once lived in but can’t return to.
Maybe that’s why I read it in the first place.
Maybe I was already grieving.
Maybe she broke my heart before I ever knew her name.
—
She will walk into my life in a couple of years.
And I will love her like a memory I had before I was born.
Like a line from a song I’ll one day forget I knew.
She’ll feel familiar somehow…
like a shape I’ve always carried inside me.
One that fits the bruises I haven’t spoken of yet.
Sometimes I wonder if I’ve been writing toward her all this time.
And when I finally meet her,
it will feel like arriving at a page I bookmarked long ago without knowing why.
And when she leaves, years after,
I will lose a part of me that only lived in her eyes.
The man who didn’t have to be clever, or careful, or useful.
Just real.
Just messy.
Just soft.
I’ll be writing for him then.
To keep him breathing.
Because he is a version of me I never became.
Because the world kept asking for something else.
I don’t fear that I’ll ever stop loving her.
But I know she’ll forget how much she loved me.
I’ll become a footnote in her life.
A sweet glitch. A lovely mistake.
The kind she’ll remember fondly, but vaguely.
Like an old film she watched on a flight.
The title’s gone, but the feeling lingers.
I know this because last week, I woke up years from now.
Not too far. Just enough to sit across from her again.
The café had changed hands, but the furniture stayed.
We had tea.
She told me about her new life… like I was hearing it for the first time.
She laughed at things I wasn’t part of.
She said someone’s name and smiled, like she didn’t notice how I flinched.
And I knew… she’d forgotten the way I said her name when no one else was listening.
She’d forgotten how I listened like it was sacred.
But I remember everything.
Not because I want to.
Because I can’t help it.
Her eyes glittered.
And I remember thinking
I’m glad she found someone who makes her sparkle like that.
Even if it wasn’t me.
I left before the tea went cold.
I didn’t say much.
Didn’t need to.
Because I saw it
beneath the varnish of the old table.
My own handwriting. Still there.
‘I guess that’s that’, it said.
—
This morning, I knew what year it was.
For once, my body knows the date.
It’s been a couple of weeks since she left.
I know because I’m looking at the book.
Still on my shelf.
Its spine is wrinkled, pages yellowed at the edges, faded from the sun.
And now I understand why it was called Possession.
It wasn’t about lovers clinging to each other, not really.
It was about all the ways we try to keep someone alive inside us.
A letter. A song. An unwritten poem.
A name we say only in our minds.
It was about carrying the outline of someone long after the warmth has left.
I think about that a lot now.
Not just what I lost,
but what I kept.
The way she laughed when I was ridiculous.
The way her eyes softened when I said nothing at all.
Those were mine
not because she gave them,
but because I witnessed them.
And maybe that’s what possession really is.
Not ownership.
Just memory with weight.
I still carry her in gestures.
In pauses.
In the way I instinctively reach for my phone to share something
before remembering there’s no one on the other end.
She’s gone, and yet,
she’s everywhere.
We were never each other’s.
But we haunt each other now, I think.
Not because we meant to.
Just because some feelings don’t know how to stop.
So I carry the remnants.
Not because I want her back.
But because I miss the version of me that lived when she looked at me that way.
The me that laughed more.
That made silly jokes and didn’t care.
That believed, if only for a moment,
that love could exist outside of time.
—
So no, this isn’t closure.
It isn’t healing.
It’s just what’s left when the story goes on without you.
And if one day, in some future I wake up in,
she pauses mid-sentence, wherever she is,
heart skipping for a reason she can’t name,
I hope she was thinking of me.
And I hope she smiles.
Featured image adapted from a photo by Wonder KIM
See more on Unsplash: @wonderkim
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