This Is How I Miss You Now

I don’t wake up every time my phone vibrates, and I don’t expect to see your name when it calls.

Fantasies about our adventures in faraway countries have long ago abandoned me, and I’m just left alone lying on my bed with my phone in one hand and coffee in another. Coffee.

I guess that’s how I miss you now. I don’t miss you painfully. I don’t miss you with mascara running all over my face as I’m trying to bring myself together on the kitchen floor at 2 am. I don’t miss you with my pillow soaked with tears and pain pinching my chest. I don’t miss you with trembling hands stalking your Instagram scrolling down your pictures with that new girl.

No. I don’t miss you like that anymore. Missing you is no longer painful.

Instead, I miss you now peacefully. I miss you when I go jogging at the stadium you used to train football at. I can still see your footprints lingering on the grass, your breath dancing in the air around me. I miss you when I watch the Friends for the twentieth time, and laugh at the parts you’d replay over and over again.

As you can see your absence doesn’t suffocate me anymore, and I’m no more drowning in the loneliness of my own bed. Your absence now is a peaceful part of my life.

I miss you in pieces, in parts. I miss you in things around me.

I miss you like an old man misses his youth or like Antarctica misses summer. I miss you, and I know I won’t have you anymore. I won’t reverse time. I won’t change the flow of rivers.

Your absence doesn’t shake my bones anymore, and you no longer occupy my thoughts. You’re not the center of the universe, stars are no more reborn from you. You’re now a breathing organism who happens to occupy a part of my heart, and lives somewhere in the narrow alleys of my past.

Yet, I miss how light mornings felt when I used to wake to the sound of your drowsy voice. How warm winters felt in your arms. I miss your softness, and how I built my own temple out of it, how I’d try to hold myself together all day knowing I can safely fall into your arms and weep away the stress.

It’s been a year now, and I still dare to say those three words, and I realized that no matter how much time will pass and where we’ll be, I’ll always, warmly, genuinely, miss you.