DROWNING WITHOUT YOU
278 Words
Episode 7
The days after Adrian left blurred into one long, endless night. Time lost meaning. Morning bled into evening, but all I felt was the heaviness pressing down on my chest, making it hard to breathe. Every corner of the apartment carried his shadow the couch where he once held me, the kitchen where we laughed over burnt pancakes, the bed where promises had been whispered like sacred vows. Now, each memory mocked me, hollow reminders of a life that no longer belonged to me.
I tried to distract myself. I buried myself in work, in books, in silence. But grief has a way of finding you, of creeping into your bones when the world grows quiet. At night, I lay awake staring at the ceiling, waiting for the tears to come. Sometimes they didn’t, and that hurt more than crying because numbness was its own kind of agony.
Friends called, worried, urging me to move on, but how do you move on when your soul feels carved in half? I wasn’t just mourning a man I was mourning the version of myself that had existed when he loved me.
Some nights, I stood by the window, watching the rain streak down the glass, imagining he might come back, drenched and desperate, whispering apologies. But reality was merciless. Adrian had made his choice, and I was left with mine: to keep drowning in the weight of his absence or to learn how to breathe again without him.
For now, I was still drowning. Each heartbeat felt like a reminder of him. Each breath, a struggle to exist in a world where he no longer belonged to me.
- Writer
