Before I could write “I Used to Miss You,” I had to notice how quiet the longing had become, how its sharpness had thinned into something almost tender. This poem grew out of that strange mercy, where the person is gone, the ache has softened, and what finally comes into focus is the shape of your own life without them.
I Used to Miss You
I used to miss you—
until even that became too much.
From a distance,
you turned into something dangerous,
something more than you ever were.
In your orbit,
silence learned how to speak—
slow, heavy, endless.
Now even that is gone.
And somehow,
I miss
missing you.
By the time I wrote this, I realised the sharpest edges of you had already faded. I keep pressing on the empty space where the ache used to live, startled by how light my hands feel now.
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Author's Note — In writing “I Used to Miss You,” I was caught by the quiet that comes after the storm of longing, when the person is gone but the ritual of missing them still lingers. There is a strange, weightless clarity in noticing that what you're grieving now is not them, but the memory of how it once hurt.
— Author's Note: Letting go of missing you meant admitting how much of my life had been arranged around an absence. The stillness only arrived when I stopped rehearsing what we were and allowed the ache to be ordinary, almost anonymous. In that quiet, I could finally feel my own pulse again, steady and unspectacular, but mine.
