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I miss you.

It's these late-night, early, early-morning situations that bring me back to you. To this feeling. I miss you, all of you, every trace of you, every inhale, exhale, inhale, pause.

Pause.

What am I doing? How can I miss something I never had, love something I never knew, want you back, when you were never here? Clearly I'm mistaken. Clearly I'm mad. Clearly, or not so; perhaps each of my sentences should start with murkily instead.

But I do miss you.

I love you. Still. It's stupid, it's crazy, it's irrational and baseless and I'm vulnerable and shallow and young but really, really, who can judge? Isn't that the foundation of love, the lack of one?

It's been so long. So long since I last saw your face, so long since our last real conversation, so long since you looked at me with calm eyes, spoke to me with kind words. It's been so long, yet unlike drug withdrawal, the pain seems to never end. There is no rehabilitation. Sometimes I can dull it, sometimes I can push it down, past my diaphragm until it suffocates, like a tiny flame, turned into barren ashes. Except those ashes never completely die out. There's always the last spark, the final flint of life that comes springing back into full-blown inferno, on nights like this.

On nights like this, I sit in desolate solitude. On nights like this, I open a new browser window, and read through all our old chats. On nights like this, I hold back the tears, hold back the regret; I hold my breath, until I feel woozy, wishing that you'd be here by the time I let go.

It's not like I haven't tried to clear you out. I've deleted your number from my phone, but it's still here in my mind. Do you ever get that? Those specks of memory that somehow get so obstinately lodged into the canals of your brain that no matter how hard you try to forget, they still manage to cling on?

Cling on, the way I'm doing right now, in such utter desperation?

It's pathetic. It's laughable and ridiculous, and come morning I'll look at this post and wish I'd never written it. But in the depth of tonight, I have no resentment. I want these words out. I want you to know, even if you don't and won't ever know, how much I miss you. How much I miss us, though we were never really us.

But I still miss us. And I want you to miss us.

Sometimes I over-analyze your previous words, those sweet nothings from our long forgotten past. I guess they were really nothings. Nothings, that, over time, became even less than that. Is there anything less than nothing? You used to tell me the opposite of love wasn't hate, but rather, indifference. Is that what you feel now? Do you even remember me, remember what we had? Perhaps, in your mind, I am but a distant whisper of an entity, if that. It's okay though, really. It's probably better this way.

It's probably better if you never remember me. If you never come to realize how I really feel. And on my end, I'll try not to feel. Distance makes the heart grow fonder, and the amount of time and space that separates us is so immense. I feel like I'm drowning. I can't latch on anymore. I don't have the strength to persist in holding my breath.

I need to breathe. It'll hurt at first, but the pain will dull; and then, maybe, I can feel what you feel.

Indifference.

42, thank you. Thank you for allowing me the chance to grasp the concept of love. Thank you for giving me this boundless expanse of emotions, over all these years. Thank you for showing me a part of myself that I would have never discovered alone. Thank you for helping me become who I am today.

I'll always love you, even when I no longer do.