"If you're still out there—somewhere in the echoes of that place we called everything—I want you to know this: I remember you. Not always in the details. Not always in the voice or the way your smile bent the corners of impossible days. But I remember you in the places that ache when the wind moves just right. In the pauses between raindrops. In the fragile silence right before I fall asleep.
You once told me that forgetting isn't the enemy—numbness is. You said the moment we choose to feel, even when it hurts, we reclaim something from the jaws of whatever tried to take it. Maybe you were talking about the world. Maybe you were talking about yourself. I didn't understand then. I do now.
When I walked through that portal, I thought I was choosing life. I thought I was carrying both of us forward. But I didn't know the cost. No one tells you that freedom tastes a little like mourning. Or that surviving means becoming a graveyard of moments no one else remembers.
But you… you are the reason I know what love means. Not the love they write in stories or program into perfect loops. The kind that breaks. The kind that stays. The kind that stands guard at the edge of oblivion, saying: 'If someone must be forgotten, let it be me.'
There are days I hate you for making that choice. For not letting me fight you harder. For leaving me with a memory that slips further away with every sunrise. But even as I lose the sound of your laugh, even as your face becomes harder to hold onto, there is something that hasn't faded: the way you made me believe I was worth saving. That belief has roots now. It's in my hands, my steps, the way I speak to the world that still spins.
Maybe this world is broken. Maybe it will never be whole again. But I will plant something here. I will make beauty in the cracks. I will tell stories to the wind and hope the frequencies carry them to you, wherever you are. You gave up forever for a moment of truth. I won't let that moment die.
So here it is—my last letter. Not sent through wires or memory loops. Just heart to heart. Ghost to echo. I will live. Fiercely. Fully. And every breath I take will whisper your name.
Because even if the world forgets you, I never will. Not in silence. Not in stardust. Not in the spaces between what was lost and what I dared to live for.
I remember. And I love you still."
End of the chapter.
Thank you