Do You Think That I Have Forgotten About You

I keep thinking that forgetting would be cleaner. A decisive act. A box shut, labeled, archived. Something finished. But memory doesn't work like that—at least not for me. It's less like deletion and more like some broken algorithm, resurfacing things I never asked to see, usually at the worst possible time. Usually at night. Usually when the city feels too awake and I feel like I'm watching my own life from across the street.

Do you think that I have forgotten about you?

I haven't. I've just learned how to be in the same room as the thought of you without it taking me out at the knees. Most days.

There's a particular cruelty to modern absence. You don't actually disappear. You linger as data. A name that still autofills before I stop it. A face preserved in better lighting than real life ever managed. Proof that we were once something solid, now flattened into pixels and timestamps. I scroll past you with the focus of someone pretending not to read their own medical report—eyes moving, brain bracing.

Everyone says time heals, but time mostly distracts. It fills the space. It gives you new routines, new people, new things to worry about so the old ones don't get your full attention. I can explain you now. I can narrate the failure like it happened to someone else. I can make it sound thoughtful, even reasonable. That doesn't mean the feeling went anywhere. It just learned how to speak more quietly. And honestly, that's worse.

I remember how we mistook intensity for intimacy. How urgency felt like love. How being constantly aware of each other felt like meaning. We were good at talking and bad at listening. Very sincere. Very ironic. Sometimes both in the same sentence. We wanted to be understood without having to explain ourselves, which—looking back—was an impossible thing to ask of anyone, but we asked it anyway.

Do you think that I have forgotten about you, or do you think I've just learned the correct posture for missing you?

Because missing you doesn't look dramatic anymore. It looks like functioning. Like answering emails I don't care about. Like laughing half a beat late and hoping no one notices. Like being "fine" in a way that takes practice. It looks like carrying you around as a private reference point, a quiet comparison for how things used to feel before everything became manageable and a little dull.

I don't replay the good parts on purpose. They just show up. In songs that don't belong to us. In offhand comments from strangers that echo something you once said without knowing why it stuck. In moments where I almost text you—not because I should, not because it would help, but because some part of my brain still thinks you're part of the system. Still reachable.

You were never the problem in the way people like to simplify things. Neither was I. Or maybe we both were, just not in ways that fit clean explanations. The real distance was between who we thought we were and what we actually had the capacity to sustain.

If forgetting means erasure, then no, I haven't forgotten. But if forgetting means no longer needing you to confirm who I am, no longer measuring the present against a version of us that can't exist again, then maybe—some days—I have.

I don't ache the way I used to. I don't romanticize the damage. I don't pretend suffering automatically makes things meaningful. What we had was real. It ended. Those facts still land differently depending on the day, but they can exist without turning into a performance.

So if you're wondering—if you ever do—whether I've forgotten about you, understand this:

You're not gone.

You're just no longer in charge of the story I'm telling myself.