do you think that i have forgotten about you?

i used to think forgetting was procedural. close tab. archive folder. mark as resolved. memory doesn’t work like software. it works like a bug that survives every update. resurfaces randomly. mostly at night. mostly when the city is loud and i feel like i’m observing my own life instead of living it.

do you think that i have forgotten about you?

no. i’ve just learned how to keep the thought of you in the room without it shutting everything down. most days. this is what passes for growth.

absence used to mean disappearance. now it means downgrade. you don’t leave. you turn into data. a name that still autofills. a face frozen in good lighting. proof that something real existed, now compressed into screenshots and timestamps. i scroll past you like people skim medical reports. fast. tense. braced.

time doesn’t heal. that’s optimistic branding. time distracts. it fills calendars. introduces new habits, new people, new problems so the old ones don’t get exclusive access. i can explain you now. summarise the ending. make it sound mutual. mature. that doesn’t mean the feeling left. it just learned to whisper. which is somehow worse.

we confused intensity with intimacy. urgency with love. constant access with meaning. we talked endlessly. listened selectively. very earnest. very ironic. sometimes in the same breath. we wanted to be understood without having to explain ourselves. an unreasonable demand. we made it confidently.

i still remember the small inventory. the unimportant things that somehow stuck. what you liked. what you tolerated. what you absolutely didn’t. how you picked cafes based on light, not coffee. how you liked sitting facing the street. how honda bikes made you irrationally happy, like practicality could be romantic if you argued hard enough. i remember which foods you claimed to hate but ordered anyway. which moods meant silence, which meant distraction. none of this is useful now. none of it helps. it just exists. lodged. like muscle memory with no muscle left to move.

missing you isn’t theatrical anymore. it looks like competence. replying to emails. laughing half a second late. being “fine” in a way that requires rehearsal. it looks like carrying you around as an internal benchmark for how things felt before life became efficient and mildly dull.

i don’t revisit memories on purpose. they just appear. in songs that aren’t ours. in strangers echoing sentences you once said. in moments where i almost text you, not because i should. not because it would help. but because some outdated part of my brain still lists you as available.

you weren’t the villain. neither was i. or maybe we both were, just not in friendly ways. the real distance was between who we imagined ourselves to be and what we could actually maintain.

do you think that i have forgotten about you?

if forgetting means erasing you, then no. if it means i don’t need you to confirm who i am anymore, don’t measure the present against a version of us that can’t exist again, then yes. occasionally.

i don’t ache like before. i don’t aestheticise the damage. i don’t pretend pain automatically adds depth. what we had was real. it ended. both facts now coexist without demanding an audience.

so if you ever wonder whether i’ve forgotten you, here’s the accurate version:

you’re not gone. you’re just no longer in charge of the story I tell myself.