you're just a stranger i know everything about

There’s something strange about remembering someone who still exists. Not in your life anymore, but in the world. Eating dinner somewhere. Laughing with someone else. Sleeping peacefully on a pillow you’ll never touch again.

“You always look serious when you think,” he once said, brushing a loose strand of hair from my face.
I smiled then. “I think too much.”
He kissed my forehead. “That’s my favorite thing about you.”

I wonder if he still says things like that. If his tone is still low and lazy when he’s fond. Or if that version of him only existed with me.

He didn’t leave like a storm. He left like a tide. Pulling away quietly, softly, without ever looking back. It took me a while to realize he was gone. At first, I thought it was a mood. A phase. One of his shut-down days. But it wasn’t. It was permanent. And polite. Like grief in a pressed shirt.

I used to think we’d survive anything. That knowing someone so deeply made you immune to losing them. But I was wrong. It turns out, the more you know someone, the easier it is for the silence to sting.

We had whole worlds between us—rituals, inside jokes, phrases that only made sense in our bubble. “Two more minutes,” I’d say when I didn’t want to leave the bed.
“Five, because I like you too much,” he’d reply.
And that was our love language: delays. Softness. Breathing room.

There’s a version of me that only existed when I was with him. A quieter, gentler girl who found safety in his presence. She believed in slow Sundays and forehead kisses and long drives with no destination. I miss her, too.

“You make me feel like I could be me around you,” he said once, after telling me something dark about his childhood. I didn’t reply. I just held his hand tighter, thinking love was enough. That if I stayed, he would choose to stay too.

But he didn’t.

There was no final fight. Just small shifts. Calls that came later and later. Messages that lost warmth. Hugs that felt like obligation.
I asked him one night, “Are we okay?”
He kissed the top of my head. “Don’t overthink it.”
But I already had.

I don’t know when I became someone he could walk away from. When my presence became a weight instead of a comfort. I still can’t point to the moment it all started to rot. I just know one day, the goodbye had already happened, and I was the last to find out.

Some nights I sit in bed and replay our last real conversation. Not the surface ones that came after, full of niceties and guilt. The real one, when I looked at him and saw the weariness behind his eyes.
“What’s going on with us?” I whispered.
He looked away. “I don’t know.”
“Do you want this?”
A pause. A breath. “I don’t know how to want anything right now.”

He didn’t mean to break me. But he did anyway. Not with cruelty. Just with carelessness. With absence. With his slow, quiet unraveling that I couldn’t keep stitching back together.

Now he’s a stranger. But not the kind I never knew. The kind who still lives in my playlists. In the curve of a stranger’s mouth. In the muscle memory of my hands when I reach for someone who isn’t him.

There are things I still do because of him. I double-knot my shoelaces. I check if the back door is locked twice. I watch that one show he swore I'd never like—turns out, he was right. But I still watch it, as if watching it keeps some invisible tether alive.

I sometimes catch myself talking to him in my head. I’ll see something funny and instinctively think, He’d love this. Then I remember—he’s not listening. And he probably wouldn’t laugh anymore (not with or around me anyway).

Do you know what it’s like to know everything about someone who doesn’t think about you at all?

He was never cruel. That’s what makes it worse. He was soft, and kind, and distant. He vanished with grace. He made it hard to hate him, so I had nowhere to put the anger. No target. Just silence.

Now, if I passed him on the street, I think I’d smile out of habit. I’d want to say, “You look well.”
What I’d really mean is: Do you ever miss me when it rains?

But I wouldn’t say it. He wouldn’t ask. We’d both keep walking.

I hope he’s found someone who makes him feel understood without needing to bleed for it. I hope he’s softer now. I hope he speaks without fear. I hope he’s healing in ways he never let himself before.

But sometimes, just sometimes, I hope he remembers me when he hears certain songs or walks into bookshops with warm lighting. I hope something tugs at him. Gently. Not painfully. Just enough.

Enough to make him pause. Enough to remind him that once, someone saw him fully and still chose to stay.

And if he does remember me, I hope it’s like the memory of a friend. Because that’s what I’d want to be in his mind now—not a wound, not a regret, not a storm. Just a soft corner of his past. A name that doesn’t sting. A chapter that mattered but is also closed at the same time.

Because despite everything, I loved him with a kindness I hope he carries. And if nothing else, I want that to be what stays.

There’s a drawer inside me labeled “Us.” I don’t open it much anymore. But when I do, I sit there for a while. Let the old air settle over me like dust on forgotten books. It doesn’t hurt like it used to. It’s quieter now. More like a sigh than a sob.

“Do you think we’ll always have this?” I had once asked, curled into him, the world outside forgotten.
He kissed my knuckles. “Yeah. Always.”
I believed him. Not because he swore it—but because he said it so gently, like it was the most obvious truth in the world.

Yes, I miss him. In the silent hours. In bookstores with golden lighting. In songs that start slow and build up to something aching. In the scent of bergamot tea and the first chilly morning of the year. I miss him like you miss something that became a part of your rhythm.

And yes, I loved him. Completely. Stupidly. In ways I didn't know I was capable of. I loved him with a kind of softness that scares people who don’t know how to hold it. And maybe, in some soft corner of me, I always will.

But I’ll love him from a distance now. From this side of healing. From the kind of peace that comes not from forgetting, but from forgiving what never got said.

“You don’t have to fix me,” he once whispered into my hair, after a long silence between us.
“I just wanted you to let me try,” I whispered back.

And maybe that was our tragedy—we loved each other, but we were loving from different wounds. Different languages. I spoke in holding on; he spoke in slowly letting go.

He is a stranger now, but not the kind you pass on the street and never notice. He’s the kind who shows up in memories like shadows—familiar, brief, bittersweet.

But I’m not waiting anymore. I’ve stopped checking if his name lights up my phone. I’ve stopped rehearsing conversations in my head, wondering what I’d say if we ever ran into each other again.

Because one day, I will meet someone whose gaze softens when they see me. Someone who won’t need me to beg for reassurance. Someone whose love doesn’t flicker when things get messy.

“Talk to me,” I’ll say, when things feel heavy.
And he’ll take my hand, look me in the eye, and say, “I’m not going anywhere.”
And that, right there, will be everything I once begged for in silence.

I’ll love this new person, not from fear or desperation, but from clarity. From knowing what it feels like to almost lose yourself while trying to hold on to someone else.

So yes, I’ll always carry the boy from before because he shaped the girl I am now. The one who taught me that even soft people can leave. The one who made me believe in forever and then taught me how to survive its ending.

But I’ll carry him like a chapter, not the whole book. Like a favorite song that still plays, even though I’ve moved on to a new playlist.

He was a chapter that taught me how to begin again.

And maybe that’s the most beautiful thing—how some loves don’t last, but they still lead you home to yourself.

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If you made it all the way here—thank you. Truly. For sitting with my words, for holding space for something that once broke me and also built me. Writing this felt like exhaling a truth I’ve carried quietly for too long. And if it made you feel seen, even for a moment, then maybe none of it was in vain.

Here’s to soft hearts, to starting over, and to believing that somewhere out there, love exists that doesn’t ask you to fold yourself smaller.

Lots of love,
Kriti ♡

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