A Place Where You’re Still Here

-by Allison

There’s a girl named Lilia who lives in a town where the rain feels like an old song and the streets remember more secrets than they should. People here say time smooths everything out — sharp memories, old heartbreaks — but Lilia knows better. Some aches don’t dull; they just settle into your bones, quiet and constant, like a tide that never really goes out.

Alex is her tide. Or he was. Or maybe he still is, in all the ways that matter.

They were together so long it’s hard for Lilia to remember where she ends and he began. She remembers the first day, of course — the soft hush of spring rain, his grin that made her feel brave enough to say yes when he asked if he could hold her hand. She remembers how he’d lean his forehead against hers when they were both too tired to speak, how his laugh could crack open the heaviest day and pour sunlight right into her ribs.

They were good. Not perfect — they fought over stupid things sometimes, the way people do when they care too much — but they were good. Everyone thought they’d last forever. Sometimes, in the soft dark when he’d breathe her name against her neck like a promise, she did too.

But forever slipped through their fingers quietly, the way warm water does when you’re not paying attention. There was no big fight. No betrayal. No cruel goodbye slammed into her chest. Just a soft, aching drift — a few missed calls, a couple quiet dinners where their eyes didn’t quite meet, a long walk where neither of them said stay even though both of them wanted to.

And so he left. And she stayed. And the world didn’t even flinch.

Now Lilia finds him everywhere. In the half-empty coffee mug tucked in the back of her cupboard — the one he always used because it was chipped, and he liked that. In the old playlist she still can’t bear to delete because his laugh is tangled somewhere between those songs. In the sweater buried at the bottom of her drawer that still smells like him on rainy days — a little like cedar, a little like soap, a lot like home.

Sometimes she wonders if he misses her too. If he ever wakes up and reaches for her out of habit. If he feels the same sting when he passes the corner store where they bought cheap candy and dared each other to dream about tomorrow. If he ever thinks Maybe we shouldn’t have let go.

Some nights, Lilia stands at her window, watching the streetlights flicker and the rain gather on the glass. She closes her eyes and pretends he’s there behind her, arms warm around her waist, chin resting on her shoulder. She whispers I miss you like he might hear it somewhere, like maybe it’ll find him in a dream or in the hush of an unfamiliar street he’s walking alone.

She knows it won’t bring him back. Missing someone never does. But maybe, in some small soft way, it keeps the part of him she loves alive — the part that laughed into her neck, the part that called her Lili when no one else did, the part that knew every crack in her heart and loved her not in spite of them but because of them.

People say time will fix it. But Lilia doesn’t want it fixed. She wants the ache — the proof that what they had was real enough to linger. So she folds the memories up like letters she’ll never send and keeps them close, tucked into all the quiet corners of her life where Alex is still hers, and she’s still his, and forever feels just close enough to touch.

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This makes me miss him too 😔😭

If only I had the chance.

I don’t he likes me though

after we unknowingly broke up