I stopped wearing the one you brought back from your trip as a present for me. the one that made you, without meaning to, tell your mom about me.
“I’m the one who has to like the scent,” you told her. “After all, I’m the one who’ll be close enough to breathe it in.”
she smiled so big when she told me that story (3 times) on your birthday party, happy to have me around in the family.
unaware that the perfume would outlive everything else between us.
a memory you created without intending to stay, without ever learning how to belong for long.
that scent lingered on my skin for months, then found shelter in the house we shared so many times.
in the clothes I folded and couldn’t wear again, in the drawers that hum with your absence and in the air that refuses to forget you.
you gave me a new scent, and left it behind as your final trace.
I don’t play the songs you showed me anymore.
each one of them is a doorway back to the passenger seat of your car. to our half-laughed conversations that somehow became the whole world, to the dinners that ran too late, the nights that felt infinite, the kind of joy that made even silence feel full.
now every melody feels like an ambush, every lyric sounds like an echo of you, trying to find its way back.
I try to avoid you in the world, but the world refuses to cooperate.
letting you go in flesh was easy, the body learns distance (eventually).
but the soul still catches on the edges of things:
a quiet sunday playing videogames,
a shirt I choose without realizing I’m still trying to please you,
the mirror showing the reflection of a girl who still searches for who she was when you loved her.
there’s a particular exhaustion in forgetting someone.
not cruel. just soft, persistent, almost tender.
it hurts beautifully, the way proof of love always does.
some loves leave, but their roots grow so deep that to pull them out would be to wound yourself.
so the pain learns its manners, and the heart, even bruised, keeps its rhythm.
sometimes, the memories return like the faded frames of an old film, the kind you still watch even when you already know the ending.
for three years, the story was you.
now I live in the epilogue, in that quiet stretch of time where love still lingers in the credits, but no longer fills the screen.
letting you go is the only way I’ve found to keep myself.
