When your voice fades from my world, I turn into a wrinkled dress collapsing into its own creases— a fabric losing the shape of itself. And when you’re gone, I wither like a thirsty flower waiting for the one hand that can save it from dying. Because no matter how desperately a flower aches to bloom, it still needs a touch— and God, how I still wish that touch were yours.
I said hand because my body remembers. It remembers my fingers slipping into yours, locking tight as if they could anchor time. It remembers whispering, I’m here. I’m staying. I’m not leaving you. Your presence washed my life clean. With you, I was a sealed bud opening to daylight, smiling at the world without knowing how. Older or not, beside you I was a girl who refused to grow up— maybe that’s why my love for you cut so deep, burned so pure, hurt so beautifully.
I miss your voice. I miss your eyes. I miss the heat of your skin— so violently that my words fall apart before they ever reach the page. Sometimes I wonder what would happen if on one of these cold nights a single warm sentence from you slipped through the silence. The thought alone shatters me— a feeling neither sweet nor bitter, but sharp enough to make my heart tremble.
We imagine the things we long for. But reality— reality never walks in wearing the face we expect. Just like the day you messaged me after your long disappearance. Your name lit my screen and my mind felt nothing— nothing at all. But my legs— my legs went numb, and then I just sat down and cried with no warning, as if my heart had been waiting for permission to break. I wish you hadn’t messaged me. I wish you had let silence live a little longer. Because when I look back, I see how unprepared I was— to face you, to hear the same words echoing again after so long. Yet every time you asked to see me, my heart and my body ran to you faster than my mind could protest.
I wish I had waited. I wish I had swallowed my words. I wish my legs had stayed numb so they couldn’t carry me back to you. But maybe the universe needed it to happen. Because the name you gave me, Ashley— after that bitter-sweet, unforgettable meeting, I didn’t let it remain a name. I breathed a soul into her, stitched her from pieces of you and pieces of me, black and white, grey in places, and sometimes painfully full of color.
Ashley was born the moment I broke. She speaks every truth I never managed to tell you. She speaks with scars, with flame, with a voice that trembles but never hides. Maybe someday you’ll hear her. Maybe her voice will reach you in a way mine never could. Maybe you’ll want to meet her, to understand her, to choose her, to begin again, not with me, but with the woman shaped from what we lost.
Maybe one day you’ll search for her. Maybe you’ll pull her out from the folds where she has been lost, and finally see her for everything you once touched, and everything you never stayed long enough to hold.
Ashley the name you gave me
submitted by /u/Nabatamb
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