There are moments when the sky feels so wide it threatens to undo me. I would look up and wonder if you were looking too, somewhere else, beneath the same indifferent stretch of stars. It seemed foolish, almost childish, but there was comfort in the thought of our gazes brushing against one another across the dark.

I used to believe distance was a measurable thing: miles, hours, the price of a ticket. But what separated us was not geography; it was the silence that grew heavier with every day. Even when you wrote, even when your name appeared, the silence had already set its foundations beneath the words.

There were nights when I could not sleep, and I lay still, listening to the house breathe. In those hours, you drifted closer, not as you were but as my mind recast you: softer, slower, more willing. I knew it was a trick of longing, but I surrendered to it, because to resist felt like erasing you altogether.

The truth is, I wanted more than you could give. Or perhaps I wanted more than anyone could reasonably be expected to give. Desire is like that — it stretches, it demands, it presses against the edges of what is possible until the whole thing collapses. And when it collapses, you are left with the quiet ache of something that once seemed infinite.

I think often of how ordinary everything looked from the outside. Two people exchanging messages, two lives running on their own tracks, occasionally crossing. Nothing remarkable. Yet inside me it was an upheaval, a constant rearrangement of thought and feeling. The world turned, unchanged, while I unravelled quietly in its shadow.

Sometimes I imagine telling you everything, stripping the words bare of grace and disguise. I would say: I missed you so much it made me cruel to myself. I missed you so much I wore holes into the days, pacing thoughts I could not mend. But of course, I never said it. And now the chance has gone, carried away like a paper boat into water too wide to follow.

I have learnt that silence is not empty; it is dense, almost physical. It presses against the chest, it crowds the mouth, it makes even the simplest phrases impossible to voice. You lived inside that silence, and I lived just outside it, knocking lightly, waiting for you to open the door.

Across the universe, or perhaps only a few streets away, you must have lived your life untouched by these confessions. And that is the hardest part: to know that what tore through me left scarcely a mark on you.

But still, I look up. The sky remains, indifferent and infinite. I tell myself that it does not matter whether you are looking too. The act of raising my eyes is enough: a gesture that belongs to me, fragile, small, but mine.