There is a heavy, one-sided weight in a memory that only one person chooses to carry. It feels like shouting into a canyon and waiting for an echo that never comes, or keeping a candle lit in a window for a traveler who has long since forgotten the way home. To miss someone who doesn't miss you back is to live in a conversation that has already ended. A quiet, lingering ache that remains even when the other person has moved on to a world where your name is no longer spoken.

The Echo in an Empty Hall

I send my thoughts like birds across the sea,

But no returning wings come back to me.

I keep your name like salt upon my tongue,

A song that only half the world has sung.

I check the door, I scan the crowded street,

For ghosts of us I’m desperate to meet.

But you are walking where the sun is new,

With not a single shadow shaped like "you."

It’s strange how much a silence can demand,

Like writing lines upon the shifting sand.

I build a monument of all we were,

While you are just a blur, a distant stir.

I’m haunted by the ghost of every "us,"

Lost in the wreckage and the settling dust.

My heart is full of things I cannot say,

To someone looking quite the other way.

So I will learn to sit within the cold,

And let the stories I have kept unfold.

I’ll miss you for the both of us tonight,

Until the morning kills the phantom light.

The hardest part of moving on is accepting that you are mourning a loss that the other person doesn't even feel. It is a solitary grief, a private ritual of letting go that requires no audience and receives no comfort. But perhaps, in the act of missing you so deeply alone, I am finally learning how to fill that space with my own strength. Turning a one-sided longing into a bridge that leads me back to myself.