There are some people you miss, not because you want them back, but because they left a space where an ending should have been. A quick epilogue to the first-heartbreak chapter, because I never leave a story incomplete.
A few years later, that boy came back into my life without an explanation for his disappearance. The closest thing to a reason came wrapped in practicality: he wanted to focus on his last year of high school and didn’t want to be distracted. As if disappearing was a productivity hack. I half believed him, the way you let a bandage pretend it’s stitches. I wanted a noble reason more than the truth. Any excuse can feel like relief when you’ve been living on questions.
I thought his comeback would fix the ache. I imagined it slotting into place like a false tooth, covering the raw nerve. But when he returned, my body stayed braced. My mind didn’t celebrate. My heart didn’t open. The old silence sat between us like a bruise you don’t poke, and what I felt wasn’t relief but bitterness, edging into vengeance. Teenage me had wanted the answer to “Where did you go?” Adult me wanted acknowledgement that he’d left a crater. That teenage burn had hardened into something cold and defensive. I could hold a grudge like a Taylor Swift song.
He acted like we could restart without touching the rupture, and he expected my heart to forget what it had learned. But I couldn’t. The gap had taught me what erasure feels like. So we didn’t get back together, because I felt more bitterness than longing.
And maybe that’s the real closure: not the missing explanation, or the repaired story that mends a broken heart, but the fact that my life didn’t stay stuck, circling a locked door. It kept moving. It brought me somewhere safer, where my body chooses steadiness, my mind stops searching, and my heart learns a new rhythm in a place that finally feels like home.