Sorry in advance for the translation Finnish does not translate in to english as well as id like to. I’ve wanted to write this for a long time. It is about how i’ve felt and still feel. I’ve been told this skirts the line betwen poetry and a short story so idk. I hope some of you find something in this.
It’s been years now, but I still think of them.
Not every day, like before. But in small moments, when the world slows down and the sounds of life fade into the background, the thought of them drifts into my mind, like an old song whose words I thought I’d forgotten. I remember the moments when we sat by the sea, wrapped around each other, thinking about the future. Only the sun and the surf of the sea for company.
In these moments I see their image reflected in a bus window, hear their voice in the notes of music, feel their presence in my shadow as I walk home in the evenings. They were everything to me. My best friend. My most trusted companion. The one who knew me better than anyone.
And then, one moment, they were gone.
—
I try to think back to the moment when everything began to change.
Did we simply grow apart? Or maybe it was the small things. How long, deep conversations turned into short exchanges of news. How our laughter-filled evenings together were forgotten, replaced by silent moments that inevitably pushed us apart. How cruel it is that grand gestures can’t mend small mistakes.
Some nights I reached across the divide and found nothing. Days when I searched for their voice, and got no answer.
I told myself it was just a phase. A phase that would pass if only I were strong enough, if only I focused on the good days and forgot the bad ones — then things might return to how they were. For a long time I kept believing that someday everything would turn for the better, that I’d wake and feel beside me the weight of someone breathing safety into the room. But hope faded, just as they did.
Love doesn’t vanish in a single night — it fades slowly, painfully. Until one day you wake to find yourself clinging to a ghost.
—
I knew it was all over the night I looked at them and felt nothing.
It was late, the sky the blue of a dream, and it felt as though the world had stopped. We stood face to face in a timeless moment, and the weight of everything left unsaid between us caught in my chest. We searched desperately in each other’s eyes for even the smallest spark of light, the smallest sign of the people we used to know. I saw only a stranger.
They looked tired, hollow. The light that had once shone behind those eyes was gone, like a morning sun that never rose. I wanted to take them in my arms and hold them there forever. I wanted to tell them that everything would be all right — even though I knew it would be a lie. Whatever we once were was already gone.
They turned away from me, or maybe I was the one who turned. Because a mirror doesn’t lie. And still, when I looked, I saw no one.
—
I’d like to say that I fought for us. I’d like to say that I tried everything to get them back, to remind them of what we once were.
The truth, though, is that I let them go. Over the years I tried to search for them — in old thoughts, in diaries, in photographs that no longer felt like my own. Mere mirages of the person I always thought I was. However hard I searched, I never found myself again.
Because how can you find someone who never really left.
—
Some evenings I catch glimpses of them. Not like before — not summer memories or old habits. Something more fleeting, something more unsettling. A shadow behind my own reflection. A familiar presence on an unfamiliar face. Sometimes it feels as though I almost recognize them. Then the feeling vanishes, and I’m alone again.
The cruelest part of all this isn’t the loss itself.
It’s that they are still here somewhere, just beyond my reach.
It’s that i am a ghost, haunting my self.
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