My dearest,
It's 3 a.m. here, and I'm looking at the blinking cursor on my screen, a familiar, silent judge. It asks me why I haven't sent this. Why I keep writing you these letters, only to save them in a folder with a name so mundane—"Drafts"—that no one would ever suspect the ache hidden inside.
I saw the moon tonight. It was a perfect, pale sliver hanging above the city. The same moon that hangs over you, I know, but somehow it feels different here. It feels like a mirror reflecting a distorted image, a life I'm still trying to get used to without you in it. I wonder if you saw it too, and if for a second, you felt that same strange connection—the one where we’re not together, but we’re not really apart either.
Life here is... fine. It's filled with new faces and new places. There's a coffee shop on the corner that makes a bitter latte I can't stand, but I go anyway because the woman who works there has a laugh that reminds me of a song I can’t quite place. I've been trying to learn the names of the streets, but they all feel a little foreign, a little flat. They don't have the history that our streets back home do, the memories etched into every crack in the sidewalk.
I miss the way you'd look at me when you were about to say something that made you laugh, that little crinkle by your eye. I miss the sound of your key in the lock, the simple promise that you were home. I even miss the way we used to argue about what to watch on a rainy Sunday afternoon. Those small, everyday things feel monumental now. They feel like a currency I've run out of.
People tell me to focus on the future, on what's to come. They say this distance is just a temporary thing, a challenge we have to overcome. And I believe that. I do. But what they don't see is the loneliness that settles in the quiet moments, the way my heart clenches when I see a couple holding hands and I instinctively reach for you, only to find nothing there.
I know this is what we wanted. This opportunity. This adventure. And I wouldn't trade it for anything, not even for the ease of being together. But a part of me, the part that's writing this letter in the dark, wishes we could have both. That we could have this new world, and our old one, all at once.
Maybe one day I'll be brave enough to press "send." But for now, I'll just save this and close the laptop. Sleep seems impossible tonight, but maybe I can dream of the day when our worlds are one again.
Yours,
(The name I am still figuring out how to be without you.)
