To the One Who’ll Never Read This - The Things I Only Say in the Dark

You will never read this.

Even if the universe folded in on itself and spat out all the impossible things it swallowed, I know this truth would still stand: these words are meant for the dark, not for you.

Still… I write.

Tonight, silence feels too loud. It presses against my chest like a hand that refuses to let me breathe. And in that pressure, I find myself thinking of you—out of habit, not longing; out of memory, not desire; out of old wounds, not love.

I wonder if you’d recognize me now.

I don’t mean physically—time changes everyone. I mean the inside of me, the parts you never cared enough to look at. I used to make myself small, folding my feelings like laundry, stacking them into neat piles just to make sure they never spilled into your comfort. I used to convince myself that if I shrank enough, softened enough, quieted enough… you might stay.

But you never stayed. Not really.

You were a door that always looked halfway open but slammed shut the moment I tried to step closer.

I wish I could tell you that I miss you. That my chest tightens when I think of your name, or that your absence left holes I can’t fill. Maybe that would make this confession sound more poetic, more tragic. But the truth is simpler—uglier, even.

I don’t miss you.

I miss the fantasy of you. The one I built in the empty spaces between your actual words. The one I painted over your silences so I didn’t have to face the truth that you never intended to stay. I miss the version of myself I pretended to be when I thought your gaze held warmth and not indifference.

I kept telling myself you cared.

I was wrong.

But I forgive myself for believing it. That’s what hope does—it puppeteers the heart until the strings snap.

There were nights I hated you, too. Nights when the hurt lodged itself in my bones so deeply I wondered if it would ever leave. I tried to bury the resentment, but it clawed its way up every time I remembered how easily you walked away. How effortlessly you forgot what I struggled to release.

But tonight, something different settles in me—not anger, not longing.

Just… clarity.

I forgive you.

Not because you earned it.

Not because you apologized.

But because I can’t keep dragging your shadow behind me like a second spine. I am tired of the weight. I am tired of bleeding over a memory that doesn’t even think of me.

You will never know how close I came to loving you.

Or how close I came to breaking because of you.

You will never know the version of me that cried over almosts and maybes.

You will never know the silence you left ringing inside my ribs.

But I know.

And that’s enough.

If ghosts could listen, maybe you would hear this.

But you’re not a ghost.

You’re just gone.

So I leave this here—in the dark, where confessions belong—and I walk away lighter than I came.

And for the first time, the dark doesn’t feel like it’s swallowing me.

It feels like it’s setting me free.