It began in the faint blue light of a computer screen, where your voice always arrived a fraction too late, as though it had been forced to pass through some narrow bureaucratic corridor before reaching me. I sometimes imagined that corridor lined with half-open doors, each revealing fragments of other people’s conversations, faint and incomprehensible, like echoes from lives I was not meant to know.

We did not see each other in the flesh much then; our shared physical spaces had been abandoned to dust and casual strangers. Yet in that absence, we began to speak more. Absence, I have since realised, is sometimes the more efficient courier of intimacy.

I grew to know the topography of your silences — the hollows that deepened when you withdrew, the ridges that formed when you returned. On certain days you vanished entirely into your own coat, grey and impenetrable. On others you unfolded, unexpectedly, like a city map, tracing for me streets and corners I had never walked but felt I already understood. It was then I began sending you songs — little parcels of sound, carefully wrapped, as though by listening you might step, even briefly, into the rooms of my life.

One song was always first in the queue: Ain’t No Mountain High Enough. I told myself it was a joke, a bit of cheerful bravado. Yet in truth it was a fragile talisman. I needed its refrain to persuade myself that the obstacles between us — the schedules, the geography, the slow erosion of shared time — could be outpaced by will alone. But the mountains the song spoke of were not geological; they were internal. And such peaks, I would later learn, appear only when you try to cross them.

When your name flashed on my phone, my body reacted with the absurd precision of a laboratory animal trained to a bell. A colony of invisible insects seemed to stir inside me, restless and bright. I reorganised my days around the possibility of those vibrations, until I noticed that music — the music that had once accompanied everything — had begun to fall away. The metronome you unknowingly carried with you was gone whenever you were gone.

The last time we met was without ceremony. We drove my red car aimlessly, singing half-remembered lyrics, sipping grape juice from a thin plastic cup that left an aftertaste of supermarket aisles. You teased me about it; I defended the choice as ecologically sound, still in that phase of life when correctness seemed a form of righteousness. Later, parked in the supermarket lot, we lingered as though the place were a public square, an agreed site for honest talk. I remember thinking, foolishly but sincerely, that we could live in that moment forever, like insects preserved in amber.

I sang you a Spanish song. You laughed, not at me but at the surprise of it, as if a locked drawer had slid open in my throat. The night outside was unremarkable, a dark sheet draped over the city, yet it seemed to hum faintly, as though aware of its own transience.

In the weeks that followed, questions arrived like damp seeping through a wall. Did you like me, or the idea of me? Did you love my actual self, or only the sketch — the book-reading, trivia-spouting, ankle-boot-wearing woman who made quips with the precision of someone who had rehearsed? The distinction mattered more than I wanted to admit.

Even in chess I held myself back, moving deliberately towards defeat. I feared that to win might puncture something delicate in you, something you would not name but would never forgive me for disturbing. This performance of ignorance had been my armour for years; I no longer knew where the pretence ended and I began.

Then there was the day you did not come. I waited beneath a lemon-scented tree, watching ants carry burdens twice their size, until the daylight turned indifferent. Later you wrote: “I slept all afternoon.” A sentence so short it might have been issued by a civil servant. I shrank, as one does when discovering the world can continue without you and not even flinch.

The silences grew heavier. I moved them from room to room in my head like cumbersome furniture, but they always returned to the centre, unignorable. I sent you a book and a memory card, a quiet offering — some attempt to protect your things with something of mine. Whether you read it or not I never knew, and that unknowing became another piece of furniture.

Now, looking back, I think of us as a harbour where ships left before dawn. Those who arrived found only salt in the air, the vessels long gone.

The mountain from the song was never really there. It was a match in the pocket, struck briefly to light a path we never walked. We spent most of our time on separate continents, yet the true distance between us was measured in inches — between my hand and yours on the gearstick, between my voice and your ear in that fraction of a second where yes might still have been possible.

I loved you with the optimism of someone who believes that playlists and car parks at midnight can anchor a future. But some futures never anchor; they dock briefly, unload an indistinct rumour, and leave without giving a destination.

If I am honest, you may have loved the label on the box more than what it contained. And I may have loved you because you stood, unknowingly, between me and the version of myself that could stop pretending.

The last time I recall seeing you clearly, you were smiling at how I matched my car — as though identity could be measured in shades of red. I still keep the taste of plastic grape juice, the small absurdity of its persistence.

Why write this now? Perhaps because I remember that night in the empty car park, two cars identical: in one, we laugh; in the other, we sit silent. Both truths exist, layered over each other. Shift them even slightly, and the outlines blur.

The mountain, if it ever was one, has dissolved. All that remains is the valley, patient, holding the echo of a song about obstacles that were, in the end, only ourselves. And I have learnt — without quite meaning to — that some stories end not with conclusions, but with a quiet folding away, as if placed in a drawer whose key has long been misplaced.