If the Universe Pulls Us Apart

There are nights when missing you feels less like an emotion and more like a place I have been sentenced to live in. A quiet country with no roads leading out, where everything carries your name and every window opens onto something that reminds me of you. I can be surrounded by voices, by movement, by an entire world insisting that life is still happening, and somehow all I can hear underneath it is the absence of yours. It is strange how one person can become so deeply stitched into another that even distance does not remove them. It only changes the way they hurt. You are not beside me, no, and yet I keep finding you everywhere – in songs I cannot finish, in evenings that feel too beautiful to spend alone, in the empty half-second after I wake before I remember that reaching for you is no longer something I am allowed to do.

I wonder if you know how often I reach for you in my mind.

Not dramatically. Not in ways anyone could notice. It happens quietly. Instinctively. Like a hand stretching across an impossible distance before the heart has time to remember that there is nothing there to hold. Sometimes I imagine your fingers reaching back toward mine, both of us suspended somewhere between almost and never, close enough to feel the warmth of each other but separated by something neither of us knows how to cross. And perhaps that is what longing really is, two hands reaching across the universe, trembling in the same darkness, never knowing whether the other is reaching too.

God, I would reach for you anyway.

Even if I knew I could never touch you.

Even if the distance between us swallowed everything else.

Because there is something about you that has always made distance feel temporary to me. Something about the way you exist in my memory that makes separation feel like a mistake the universe will eventually correct. I know how foolish that sounds. I know life does not owe us reunions simply because our hearts continue waiting for them. People leave. Doors close. Time is merciless enough to teach us that love does not always receive the ending it deserves. And still there is this stubborn part of me that looks at all the miles, all the silence, all the things standing between us and thinks  surely this cannot be all there is.

Surely I was not given the privilege of knowing you only to spend the rest of my life learning how to survive without you.

And your eyes – God, your eyes.

I think that is where I lose whatever remains of my reason.

There are beautiful eyes, and then there are eyes that make you understand why people once mistook human beings for constellations. Yours have always felt like that to me. Not because of their color, although I could spend lifetimes memorizing every shade hidden inside them, but because of what lives behind them. There is something impossibly alive there. Something soft and ancient and wounded and luminous. When you look at me, I do not feel as if I am simply being seen. I feel as though I am standing at the edge of an entire universe and someone has opened the gates.

Your eyes have always betrayed the beauty of your soul.

Even when you try to hide it.

Especially then.

There are things inside you that you probably believe no one notices. The tenderness you disguise as indifference. The sadness you tuck behind laughter. The gentleness you pretend is ordinary because admitting how deeply you feel things would make you vulnerable. I have seen pieces of it. Tiny pieces, perhaps. But they were enough. More than enough. I looked into your eyes and saw entire galaxies you never spoke about, and something inside me whispered that I could spend the rest of my life exploring them and still die knowing I had only discovered a fraction of you.

And I would.

I would lose myself there willingly.

I would step into the universe behind your eyes without asking where the ground ends. I would walk until there were no stars left to follow. I would let every familiar part of myself disappear if disappearing meant I could remain somewhere inside you. If loving you were an ocean, I would not fight the current. I would not call for shore. I would not search for something to save me.

I would let myself drown.

Freely.

Completely.

There is something almost peaceful about imagining it – that kind of surrender. To stop pretending I want to survive you. To stop acting as though loving you is something I can keep neatly contained in some safe corner of my chest. It never stayed there. You overflowed everything. You reached parts of me I had kept hidden even from myself, and now I carry the consequences everywhere. That is the cruelest thing about yearning for someone, eventually, you are not simply missing them. You are missing the person you became when they were near.

I miss who I was around you.

I miss the softness that came naturally when I thought of you. I miss the ridiculous hope. The way the world seemed to sharpen around your presence, as though colors became brighter simply because you existed somewhere inside them. I miss having somewhere for all this love to go. Now it sits inside me with nowhere to belong, turning heavier with every passing day. Love was never designed to remain unanswered this long. It curdles into longing. Longing becomes grief. And grief, when you keep feeding it memories, learns how to breathe.

Mine breathes your name.

Sometimes I wonder whether you ever feel it too. Whether there are moments when your day suddenly becomes quiet and some invisible thread pulls at your chest. Whether you ever stop in the middle of something ordinary because a memory of me has arrived without permission. Maybe you hear a song. Maybe someone says something I would have said. Maybe you see a sky so painfully beautiful that for one impossible second you wish I were standing beside you to see it.

I wonder if your hand ever reaches before your mind remembers.

I wonder if some part of your soul is still looking for mine.

Because mine has never stopped looking for yours.

I have tried to explain you away. Believe me, I have tried. I have called this attachment, nostalgia, loneliness, timing, imagination – anything except what it feels like. Anything except the unbearable truth that some people enter your life and rearrange something permanent inside you. You did that to me. You walked into rooms within me that I had never opened, touched things I thought were already dead, and somehow made them ache again.

There are times I hate you for that.

Not truly. Never completely.

But there are nights when longing becomes anger because anger is easier to survive than tenderness. I become angry that you are somewhere in this enormous world continuing to exist while I am here carrying conversations we never had. Angry that the sun still rises over wherever you are. Angry that strangers get to pass you in streets, stand beside you in grocery stores, hear your voice casually, look into those eyes without understanding that I would tear entire constellations from the sky just to have one more moment inside them.

How dare the world receive you so casually when I have spent so much of myself missing you?

How unfair that someone can stand three feet away from you and feel nothing while I would give almost anything just to close the distance.

And yet, beneath the anger, it is always sadness.

It always comes back to sadness.

Because I do not want to be furious with you. I want to sit beside you somewhere quiet. I want the kind of silence that does not need filling. I want to look at you long enough that you become embarrassed and ask me what I am staring at, and I want to lie and say, nothing, because how could I possibly explain that I am trying to memorize the face I would recognize in every lifetime? I want our hands resting close enough that one small movement could make them touch. I want that unbearable moment before contact, when the entire world seems to hold its breath.

I want the almost.

I want the trembling second before almost becomes real.

Sometimes I think our entire story lives inside that space between two reaching hands.

You on one side.

Me on the other.

The universe somewhere between us, cruelly beautiful, filled with all the things that brought us together and all the things that keep us apart.

And maybe that is why I cannot stop imagining your hand reaching back.

Maybe hope is simply another form of grief when you love someone you cannot have.

Because no matter how many times I tell myself to let go, some part of me remains suspended there, fingertips stretched toward yours. Waiting. Wanting. Believing that perhaps if I reach far enough, love might bend whatever laws are keeping us separate. That perhaps the universe will grow tired of pulling us apart. That perhaps all the stars that witnessed me missing you will finally take pity and rearrange themselves into a road leading home.

Home.

That word terrifies me because somewhere along the way, it began sounding like you.

Not a house. Not a city. Not coordinates on a map.

You.

Your voice when it softens.

Your laugh when you forget to hold it back.

Your eyes when something honest passes through them.

The fragile space beside you where, for a moment, I felt as though I could put down every weapon I had ever used to survive.

Maybe that is why losing distance to you feels impossible. You cannot simply walk away from somewhere your soul recognizes as home without spending the rest of your life slightly homesick.

And I am homesick for you in ways language was never built to describe.

It is in my bones.

It is in the way loneliness changes shape when I think about you.

It is in every beautiful thing that immediately makes me wish you were there.

I see sunsets and think of you. I hear laughter in another room and wonder what yours sounds like tonight. I look at the moon with the ridiculous comfort of knowing that perhaps you can see it too, as though sharing the same piece of sky makes the distance between us smaller.

Maybe somewhere, you are looking up too.

Maybe your heart is quiet.

Maybe mine is the only one still calling.

That possibility hurts more than I know how to admit.

Because what if this connection exists only inside me? What if I turned your kindness into constellations and mistook my longing for destiny? What if I have been standing at the edge of this imagined universe, calling your name into the dark, while you have already walked away from it entirely?

I ask myself these things because I am trying to be sensible.

And then I remember your eyes.

And every sensible thought abandons me.

There was something there.

I do not know what it was. Maybe I never will. But I refuse to believe I invented every quiet second, every charged silence, every moment when the air between us felt too fragile to disturb. Sometimes a person looks at you and nothing happens. And sometimes a person looks at you and suddenly the entire architecture of your inner world changes.

You looked at me, and something moved.

Something still hasn’t moved back.

Perhaps that is what you will always be to me, the person who left fingerprints on a part of my soul no one else had touched.

I do not know whether we are meant for one another. I no longer trust phrases like that. “Meant to be” has become too painful a thing to believe in when so many people who belong together somehow end up apart. Maybe some souls collide not because they are meant to remain, but because they are meant to leave echoes.

And you have left so many echoes inside me.

I hear you in everything.

Even silence sounds different now.

There are nights when I imagine another life – not a perfect one, only one in which circumstance was kinder to us. A life where there was no hesitation, no distance, no wrong timing, no fear. I imagine reaching for you and finding your hand already there. I imagine your fingers closing around mine as if they had always known the shape of them. I imagine looking into your eyes without having to worry about how long I am allowed to stay.

And in that life, I would stay.

God, I would stay.

I would spend years learning every hidden language inside you. I would know which silences mean you need space and which ones mean you desperately want someone to remain. I would memorize the things that make your face soften. I would learn the stories you struggle to tell. I would sit beside every version of you – the beautiful ones, the difficult ones, the tired ones, the wounded ones you are afraid would make someone leave.

I would not ask you to be easier to love.

I would only ask you to let me.

Maybe that is the saddest part.

I have so much tenderness for you and nowhere to put it.

So I write it here, into words you may never read, letting sentences carry what my hands cannot. I tell paper what I cannot tell you. I confess to empty rooms. I write your absence into something almost beautiful because if I cannot have you, perhaps I can at least give shape to the missing.

Perhaps I can make a cathedral from the ache.

Perhaps I can hang stars inside it.

Perhaps someday someone will walk through the ruins and understand that something sacred once lived here.

You.

Always you.

And if the universe truly has decided that our hands should remain inches apart forever, if I am destined to spend my life reaching toward a warmth I can never touch, then I suppose there are worse things than having loved someone enough to make eternity feel too short.

But I will not pretend it does not destroy me.

I will not turn this into a lesson about letting go. I will not dress longing in pretty language and call it healing.

I miss you.

I want you.

I yearn for you in ways that frighten me.

And somewhere inside me is still that hand reaching across the dark, refusing to close into a fist, refusing to fall back to my side.

Still reaching.

Still trembling.

Still waiting for yours.

Because some souls meet and leave with clean edges.

And some collide so violently that even after the universe pulls them apart, pieces of them continue travelling toward each other through the dark.

Maybe that is what we are.

Two distant stars whose light has not realized yet that they are no longer together.

Two hands forever suspended in the moment before touch.

Two souls calling across an impossible distance.

And if I could reach you only once more – if the universe offered me one final moment, one breath, one look into those impossible eyes – I think I would forget every reason I ever had to protect myself.

I would step toward you.

I would look into that universe again.

And when it opened beneath me,

I would not ask to be saved.

I would let myself fall.

I would let myself drown.

And I would drown in you gladly.