Another night when sleep refuses to come.

You are still somewhere in my mind, my heart, my soul. In truth, you never really left. I am simply too burned out to feel the weight of your absence anymore.

Sometimes I imagine that one day, someone will ask me about you, the one person I could never quite forget. I would not even know where to begin.

I would start with the first moment I saw you.

That was when I discovered the most beautiful, most energetic smile in the universe. You were bright, talkative, completely alive. You stole my heart that night and, somehow, never gave it back.

And when I eventually became lucky enough to call you mine, even for a little while, I was the happiest man in the world.

You made me feel complete. You gave me something to look forward to when I opened my eyes in the morning. You made life feel exciting again. I was doing fine before you, but you showed me how extraordinary life could actually be.

For a little while, I found love.

And because of you, I wanted to become better. Not because I was ashamed of who I was, but because you made me want to give the best of myself to someone I thought deserved it.

Perhaps you were right. Perhaps there was something missing in me. Or there wasn't. Maybe I simply need to stop searching for whatever I thought I lacked, because it was never something I had to find at all.

When you left, I became bitter. Angry, even. I blamed you in my head for a while. But somehow, I could never truly hate you.

I still think of you sometimes. It doesn't hurt in the same way anymore. Perhaps that is healing. Or perhaps it is simply exhaustion.

What frightens me more is realizing that I don't seem to feel the same way about anyone else anymore.

I have stopped having things to say. I don't particularly want to talk to anyone. I finish what needs to be finished, then repeat the same day again.

Wake up. Work. Eat. Sleep. Repeat. Nothing terrible. Nothing extraordinary. Just nothing to look forward to.

I don't think I am looking for death. I think I am simply tired of carrying this emptiness. I want everything to become quiet for a while. I want to put the weight of everything down without having to explain why I am tired.

She is living her life. We wanted different things. I chose to fall for her, and I was hurt. There is no villain in that story. That is simply the way life sometimes is.

I have stopped wondering whether things would have been different if we had met at another time, at another stage of our lives. There is no if anymore. There is only what happened.

And somehow, I have become numb. Bored. Lonely.

Sometimes I go somewhere crowded just to surround myself with enough strangers to convince myself that I am not alone. I disappear into the noise for a few hours, hoping that proximity to other people might imitate connection.

But it never quite does.

I still crave someone to talk to. Someone to come home to. Someone with whom silence does not feel empty.

And yet I no longer have the courage to open that door again. Because I know what it feels like when someone becomes your whole world and then leaves.

I am simply lazy now. I am tired. I have lost something I once had. I barely want to photograph anymore. I want to lie on the sofa and disappear into meaningless scrolling until another day has passed.

Outside, it is raining. Strangely, the rain is the last thing that still feels comforting.

I don't know when I stopped loving the sun. When daytime became something I wanted to escape. When darkness became easier to live in than light.

Perhaps darkness doesn't frighten me anymore because I have already spent so long looking into it. And perhaps the most terrifying thing is not the darkness itself, but realizing how comfortable an empty person can become inside it.

Sometimes I wonder: Is this who I am now? Am I destined to carry sadness beside me for the rest of my life? Is despair simply going to become another name for companionship? What is the point when nothing seems to reach me anymore?

I don't know. Tonight, I don't have an answer. I only know that I am tired. And maybe, for tonight, that is enough.

I don't need to understand my entire life before morning. I just need to make it to morning.