Two hearts on one journey 🫂🌎

Chapter 6: Shadows of Us🌘

If Chapter 5 was the sunlight, this is the shadow it leaves behind. Love, once so full and radiant, now feels like a hollow echo in a vast, empty room. The same arms I longed to hold you with now ache with nothingness. My heart, which once danced at the thought of you, now drags itself through days that feel endless.

I used to close my eyes and imagine you, your warmth wrapping around me like a favorite blanket. Now, when I close them, all I see is the space between us, a chasm that feels wider with every passing day. It's cruel how love can make absence feel like a physical weight, pressing down on my chest until I can barely breathe.

In Chapter 5, I compared your love to a garden, something to tend and cherish. But tonight, it feels like I'm standing in that same garden after a storm—petals bruised, leaves torn, the fragrance of hope washed away. I kneel there, trying to pick up the pieces, yet I know no amount of effort will make it bloom again until you're here.

Even memories betray me now. I used to revisit them like a favorite song, replaying every detail to feel close to you. But lately, they feel sharp and jagged, cutting deeper every time. Your laugh, once my greatest comfort, now feels like a ghost haunting me. Your scent—lavender and honey—lingers in my mind, but it's faded, and I'm terrified of the day it disappears entirely.

You are my sunrise, I said. But what is the sun without the night to remind me how much I need its light? This distance feels like an eternal night, cold and unyielding, where even the stars can't seem to find me.

To hold you again would be everything. It would be like thawing after a winter so harsh it left me frozen in place. But until that moment comes, I'm left with the ache of imagining it. I wonder if my hands will even remember how to touch you, if my heart will know how to beat without breaking when it finally feels yours again.

There's a cruel beauty to love like this. It teaches you the depths of what the human heart can endure, the way it can break and still keep beating. But it also reminds you of the cost—the nights spent crying into the void, the moments when hope feels like an illusion.

In Chapter 5, I called our love a masterpiece, painted with strokes of joy and longing. But tonight, that masterpiece feels incomplete, a canvas abandoned in the middle of creation. I sit here, staring at it, wondering if the final brushstrokes will ever come.

I miss you. In ways I can't put into words, in ways that feel like they'll shatter me if I let myself feel them fully. You are the ache in my chest, the reason my tears fall, and yet, you are still my home. Even in this sadness, I know I would choose this love—this unbearable, beautiful love—over a life without you.

Because even the shadows of us are worth holding onto.