w3ston

He left once before i ever learned what it means to be repeated in someone’s life as absence. he did not leave all at once. It was gradual, almost careful, as if disappearance could be made less accountable if it happened in increments. I mistook it for distance at first, the kind that people survive without naming. But it kept thinning until there was nothing left to respond to, only the memory of being responded to.

Then he came back.

Not like an interruption, more like a correction he made to his own timeline. As if what had ended could be edited by returning to the same place and standing in it again. He told me he was grateful, he told me enough to make me remove my layers. He told me enough for me to let him inside my bed.

He left again, gradually, slipping out the door. Maybe it was for her, maybe I made her up so there was a reason.

A year passed where loss stopped behaving like an event and started behaving like a condition. I lost what I thought was structurally permanent. I lost stability without warning and without replacement. I lost the person closest to me, and that loss did not stay contained, it spread, quietly, into everything that had once felt intact. After that death, even ordinary days felt like they were missing their base layer, as if something essential had been removed from beneath them and I was expected to continue walking anyway.

There were no clean separations between losses. Each one seemed to loosen the next. It became difficult to tell where one ending stopped and another began. Grief was no longer a moment I entered, it was the environment I remained inside.

And then he returned into that.

He said sorry. A simple word placed into something that was no longer simple. I told him what had happened because there was no smaller version of it that felt honest. I told him about everything that had been taken about death, about the kind of loss that does not resolve into lessons or closure, about how the person closest to me is gone in a way that does not change. I didn’t tell him to burden him. I told him because it was already living in everything I said.

I was so excited because I missed him, I did. I longed for him, I dreamed of him, I devoted my nights into imagining him. I also needed a pause from the darkness more than I needed anything. I needed something that didn’t feel like grief pressing on every surface of my life, something that let me forget how heavy everything had become. And his return felt, briefly, like that kind of interruption, like I could set some of it down for a while and just exist without everything I had been carrying sitting so close to my chest.

And yes, I did think things would be different. Not in a clean, certain way, not like I had proof, but in the way you start to hope for interruption when life has already repeated too much of the same ending. Maybe it wasn’t logic. Maybe it was delusion. Maybe it was exhaustion reaching for any possibility that wasn’t continuation. When he came back, some part of me wanted to believe this time might not fold back into the same shape.

But even in that excitement, it was hard to respond to him at first, because guilt came with it immediately, heavy and immediate, like I wasn’t allowed to feel relief without paying for it. I felt guilty for wanting him back after everything, guilty for how quickly I softened when he appeared again, guilty for how much I still wanted him despite knowing what had already happened before.

And underneath all of that, there was something sharper , I felt like I was betraying the one I lost. Not because he was replacing them, he wasnt, but because I had learned to live with their absence as something permanent , something sacred in its finality, and my body reacting to him with excitement felt like it was crossing a boundary I didn’t know how to name. Like wanting anything new again was somehow disrespectful to the enormity of what I had already lost. I cried at the sky asking if it was okay. I begged the sky to tell me what it meant or if it was worth it.

So every message I sent felt complicated. Like I was trying to hold two truths at once: that I missed the possibility of feeling lighter, and that I was still carrying a loss that had no resolution and no replacement. I answered anyway, carefully at first, as if I could regulate how much of myself I was letting back into contact with him. I didn’t realize then how quickly something that feels like relief can begin to mimic the shape of repetition again.

I finally gained comfortability that didnt feel like guilt, just excitement. I shared insights into my day, into my life. I hung onto every insight he returned. I felt excitement for the first time in that storm. I didnt expect it to end in the same cruel way he perfected.

He stayed for two weeks.

Two weeks after all of that.

Two weeks after I had already learned what permanent absence feels like.

Two weeks that briefly resembled continuity before beginning, again, to dissolve.

Now I am away with my family, trying to stay inside something that is still intact, and I can feel him withdrawing again in the same familiar way, slower replies, longer silences, the gradual vanishing that refuses to name itself. It is not sudden enough to be undeniable, but it is consistent enough to be recognizable.

I keep circling the same thought I don’t want to name directly, because once I do it stops being something I can soften or rearrange. It starts to look like a pattern instead of a confusion.

Maybe he dosent come back to return to anything. Maybe he comes back because I am still here when he needs something to be reflected back to him, attention, reassurance, the feeling of being wanted without the weight of staying long enough to be responsible for what that wanting does.

It would explain the timing, the way he appears when it suits him and disappear when it doesn’t, like closeness is something he can step into and out of without it changing shape for me on the other side.

And I hate that part, the way I keep becoming available space for it. The way I still answer. The way I still open the door even when I already know what usually happens after.

Because it starts to feel less like return and more like use. Not always cruel, not always intentional, but still one sided in a way I can’t unsee once I’ve seen it.

Maybe it’s attention he wants. Maybe it’s validation. Maybe it’s the ease of being desired without having to hold it, without having to stay long enough for it to become responsibility instead of a moment. Maybe he feels like this is more moral than using women’s physical forms.

And maybe I am just the place where that gets taken, briefly, before he goes again.

What I can’t stop thinking about is how quickly I start to confuse that with meaning, how easily I still reach for something deeper in it, even when another part of me already knows what it keeps turning into.

I never expected much from him after he moved away. I had already lowered expectation to something almost defensive. But I didn’t expect this, not that he would return into the middle of so much accumulated loss and still repeat the same pattern, not that he would step into a life already full of endings and become another one without seeming to notice the weight of what he was entering.

Because what I have already lost is not background to my life.

It is the structure of it now.

And he knows that.

He knows about the year that took almost everything from me. He knows about the death of the person closest to me, the kind of absence that does not become smaller with time. He knows what it means to be standing in a life where loss has already accumulated beyond what feels survivable.

And still, he returns and leaves again inside it.

And I keep trying to understand how someone can know that history and still choose to enter it like it is not already full.

Not because I believe I am owed permanence.

But because I cannot understand how someone stands in the middle of that much absence and adds themselves to it.

He says it is because of his illness.

And I will give him that.

I do believe him when he says he is unwell.

I will give him that, because I can recognize that not everything that breaks people is a choice, and not everything that repeats is intention. I lost my person to the same kind of illness that breaks the soul but that is how I know you can’t excuse everything under that guise.

But even giving him that does not make the pattern stop feeling like something I am left inside of.

It does not change that I am still here, holding everything that has already left, watching him become another version of loss again.