Before everything changed, we were happy.
Very happy.
And perhaps that is the part that hurts the most.
We hadn’t argued.
There had been no goodbye message.
No conversation about an ending.
Nothing had prepared me for what was about to happen.
In my mind, October still existed.
The forty-nine days were still growing fewer.
The promises were still there, along with the video calls and all the things we were going to do together.
Then came an evening.
An ordinary one, at least at first.
The person I looked forward to seeing on my screen every night had gone out.
There was nothing unusual about that.
People go out.
They laugh.
They have a drink.
They meet their friends.
They need time for themselves.
I didn’t want to control anyone’s life.
Nor did I have the right to.
But after that evening, something changed.
I don’t know what happened that night.
I don’t know what conversations took place, what thoughts crossed anyone’s mind, or whether that evening had anything to do with the change between us at all.
I only know what I saw from my side of the screen.
Replies becoming less frequent.
Conversations growing shorter.
A warmth that seemed to be slowly fading, without any explanation I could understand.
And a new kind of absence, appearing in the very place where I had once felt so close to someone.
Another evening passed.
Then another.
The video calls no longer came the way they used to.
My phone, which had once been our meeting place, had become something I stared at more and more often, without even knowing what I was waiting for.
Three days.
Three days without seeing the face I had once watched until I fell asleep.
I couldn’t make sense of it.
How could we go from nights when neither of us wanted to end the call to entire days without seeing each other at all?
I tried to find explanations.
Maybe it was exhaustion.
Maybe it was the problems I already knew about.
Maybe some quiet was needed.
Maybe it had nothing to do with me.
I kept telling myself not to be afraid.
Then I looked at my phone.
And I was afraid anyway.
When we did manage to talk, something felt different.
It wasn’t just a lack of time.
It was the way I could suddenly feel the distance.
There seemed to be fewer words.
Colder replies.
And I found myself weighing every sentence, searching for a trace of the closeness I had once known.
Perhaps not every reply had been cold.
Perhaps memory, when it hurts, has a way of simplifying things.
Turning shades of grey into sharp contrasts.
But the overall feeling was impossible to ignore.
Something between us had changed, and I didn’t know why.
I tried to find the exact moment when things had begun to fall apart.
That evening?
A conversation I knew nothing about?
A problem that had become too heavy to carry?
Fear?
A change of heart?
My mind invented dozens of explanations.
And I had no evidence for any of them.
That was the most exhausting part.
Not simply waiting.
But trying to understand something when you didn’t have enough information.
I went back to the photographs from our holiday.
The bench along the seafront.
The coffee brought to me on a day off.
The melted chocolate.
The gummy candies we had eaten in a park.
Our hands intertwined as we crossed the street.
The sunset among the rocks.
The fence on the day I left.
Then I opened our latest messages.
And I couldn’t make them belong to the same story.
How had we ended up here so quickly?
Where had that closeness gone, the one that had made distance seem so easy to overcome?
I wondered whether I had imagined more than had really been there.
But then I remembered the nights when we sat with our eyes half-closed, still looking at each other through our screens.
I remembered the countdown.
The affectionate names.
The plans.
And I couldn’t pretend that none of those things had happened.
I didn’t need new promises.
I didn’t need to be told that everything would be fine.
I only wanted one clear sentence.
“I don’t want this anymore.”
“I’m afraid.”
“I can’t.”
“Something happened.”
Any truth, even a painful one.
Any explanation that might help me understand where we stood.
Instead, I received fragments.
Silences.
Words I tried to piece together, never knowing whether I was understanding them correctly.
And for the first time, the translation app was no longer the problem.
Words could be translated.
Silence couldn’t.
The hardest part wasn’t being far away.
I had already learned how to live with distance.
I had learned how to love through a screen.
How to wait.
How to count the days.
How to find closeness in a few words and a single glance.
But now, I no longer knew what I was waiting for.
Or whether we were still waiting together.
It wasn’t the distance between us that frightened me.
It was no longer knowing where I belonged in that person’s life.
To be continued…
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