still, november
quick note : wrote this back in November, when the air felt heavier and his name lingered in everything
We love with our whole selves, until one day we find there’s less of us left in it. Or maybe it’s just me.
I’ve always learned loss in quiet ways. I remember I once had a turtle; one afternoon I came home from school to an empty cage, my Mother offering a gentle excuse about it accidentally getting out. I searched every corner of the house for days, convinced something so slow couldn’t just disappear. But funny, isn’t it, how even the quietest things can vanish the fastest? Maybe that’s how we ended too. Love slipped away without announcing itself, and one day we were just looking at the empty place it left behind. Maybe we faded in the same hush.
Get voletia’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
I loved you madly. The kind of love that would stand in front of a wind, strong enough to tear me from my own balance because loving you felt worth the fall.
I loved you loudly too. I carried your name in every room I walked into, told people about you with a pride that felt like sunlight, as if loving you was something the world needed to know.
But here I am, standing in front of the same people with a different kind of honestyㅡ trying to explain that even the loves we give with our whole selves, don’t always stay. Because if something that moves so slowly can leave without a trace, then maybe it makes sense that something louder could too.
Maybe love loosened its grip, but some truths never follow it out the door. People don’t really leave; they linger in the quiet habits they left behind. In the way a stranger’s laughter catches mine off guard, turning my head before I can think. In the taste of something I once pushed away, now warm and familiar because it once belonged to you. And when November comes, it carries a weight the other months don’t — as if it remembers for me — how some people settle into you in ways you never learned how to undo.
So I’m putting this into words, not to reach for you, but to acknowledge that even after the love has faded, some part of you remains, a quiet proof that we once existed. And this November, the one that still feels like you, even apart, I still, and always, hope happiness chooses you first, carrying the thought that maybe one day November will no longer mean you and return me to us.
