I think one of the strangest things about being a parent is watching your child experience a moment you can so clearly remember experiencing yourself. Not the big, blurry memory of childhood. The specific feeling of an age.

You remember what it felt like to stand outside an elementary school on the first day, wondering who would be in your class. You remember walking into middle school and realizing almost immediately that the rules had changed. You remember being a senior and feeling like your real life was waiting just beyond graduation.

For you, somehow, it feels like all of that happened a week ago. And then one morning you wake up and the people you birthed are living it.

This morning, my oldest drove himself away for the first day of his senior year. My middle child climbed onto the bus for his first day of junior high. And I walked my youngest to school for the beginning of fifth grade.

Three kids. Three completely different edges of childhood. All in one morning.

I stood in the cla…

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If I go back and look at most of the posts I’ve written here, on my Substack, they are really just me trying to find a way toward myself.

I have always carried this strange sense of loss inside me. Not grief exactly. More like homesickness for a place I have never actually been. Like there is some version of me living a few rooms ahead and, if I could just find the right door, I would finally meet her.

I would understand what I wanted. I would know what I was meant to do. I would stop circling around my own life trying to decipher it and simply become the woman I have always imagined I could be.

But lately I have been wondering what it is about myself that I still don’t understand.

Because the life I have always imagined looks very different from the one I am living.

I have always felt called toward a big life. I imagined traveling to places I had never seen before and eating things I didn’t know existed. I imagined grand dinner parties with too many candles and people lingering long after…

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The plants in my hallway always die. No matter which one I put there.

We forget to water them, or there isn’t enough light, or maybe something just sits in that space. Something heavy. Sometimes I wonder if the plants feel it before I do, if they take it in and fill themselves up with whatever gets stuck there. Either way, they don’t last long.

The strange part is, I don’t throw them away.

I leave them in their dusty pots, the soil pulled tight and dry like it’s done asking for anything. I pass them every day like a graveyard for the grief I’ve been carrying lately.

No flinch. No urgency. No, this needs to be handled.

Just walking by like it’s normal to live alongside dead things, like parts of me haven’t been doing the same.

There’s one plant in particular. All the leaves are gone. Just two bare sticks standing in dried-out dirt like they’re pretending to still be alive.

A few weeks ago, I was walking from my room to the kitchen with a cup of water from the night before. Instead of going al…

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My room is the cleanest it’s been in months. Hell, I even made my bed.

I’m itching to deep-clean the fridge too. I mean, it needs it. I genuinely cannot tell you the last time I wiped down those shelves. But if I’m being honest with myself, the only reason I want to do any of this right now is to avoid doing this.

Writing.

I know. I know. It’s a little ridiculous to walk around calling yourself a writer and then choose the crisper drawer over the blank page. But here I am. My friend called it planned procrastination when I told her about it the other day, and honestly, that’s the most accurate thing anyone has ever said to me. I am actively, intentionally, creatively finding every single thing to do except the thing I actually want to do.

Because the thing I want to do scares me.

Not because I’ll fail at it.

Because I’ll succeed.

And I know what you’re thinking. Audrey, if succeeding is the goal, why are you cleaning the fridge?

Well, my friend. I built m…

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By the end of 2022, everything I had spent years asking for had finally happened.

My business was thriving. I had become an internationally licensed life coach and was running a program helping creatives build their own businesses. My art was being recognized and purchased in places I once only dreamed about. The art markets I had started were full of people and life and possibility. I was surrounded by incredible humans and a creative community that felt alive and electric.

For a moment there, it felt like I had climbed to the top of something I had spent years building.

And then, in early 2023, everything caught fire.

My separation from my husband was the match.

The personal life I had kept carefully packaged away from what I was building collided with it all at once, and the fallout burned through almost everything I had created.

There were also things happening inside me that I didn’t fully understand yet. I had a serious upper-limit problem. Somewhere deep down, I didn’t believe I was …

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This morning, I spent hours negotiating with someone who asked for what they wanted with such audacity that it stayed with me long after the conversation ended.

Not because the request made sense.
But because of how boldly it was made.
As if the answer should already be yes. As if what I built were flexible by default. As if my time, my labor, my years were simply things to be adjusted.

I stayed in it. I held the line. I did not cave or caveat or soften the truth to make it easier to accept. I said no where no was required. I said yes only where it was real.

And when the conversation ended, my body did not relax.

It buzzed.
Jaw tight. Chest hot.
That familiar aftermath of having been firm and immediately wondering if I had done something wrong.

Because the unsettling part was not the negotiation.
It was what happened inside me afterward.

What rose up was not fear.

It was shame.

Fear reacts to danger.
Shame questions your right to exist this way.

Shame is the reflex that arrives after you have done t…

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One of the things I’ve learned about myself is this: when something sparks my curiosity, acting on it right away tends to lead me exactly where I’m meant to go. That’s how I found myself reading Existential Kink.

I knew very little about the book before I picked it up. I’d heard it was a little woo-woo, a little philosophical, sprinkled with self-help, which is basically my love language. But I wasn’t prepared for how much I would genuinely resonate with what it had to offer.

I’ve spent years, maybe decades at this point, working with my shadow self. I’ve done enough affirmations, meditations, and somatic practices to earn some kind of spiritual punch card. And still, I always felt like I couldn’t go deep enough to fully touch the thing I was trying to heal.

As a Scorpio sun and moon, depth is my home. So, finding a book that turns depth into a hallway that leads even deeper? I devoured it.

What surprised me even more was the way it invited me to sit with the duality of both the shadow se…

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“Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.”
— Bell Hooks, All About Love: New Visions

Lately, it feels like the world is breaking in a hundred different directions at once. Everyone is tired. Everyone is carrying something. And most of us are trying to do it quietly, alone, behind our screens. Like we’re all just… drowning a little while still answering emails.

So I’m leaning into the one thing that has always saved me.

Connection.
Real life.
People.

Maybe this is the medicine.
Maybe healing looks like coming back to each other.

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I wrote this to try to understand what actually happens after an ending.

Not the closure-or-healing version of things, but the quieter middle where things are still breaking down, life hasn’t stopped yet, and where nothing feels finished, but yet, movement is happening anyway.

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Some stories slip under your skin in a way you can’t shake.

Suddenly, you’re seeing your life through a wand, a spell, a girl who shrinks, and a woman who rises. I didn’t expect Wicked to call me out, but here we are.
This is the truth I found between those lines.

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A little bit ago,

I shared in this post how I didn’t just separate from my husband, I realized that long before that, I had already separated from myself.

It wasn’t a sudden storm, the kind that rips roofs from houses and leaves wreckage in its wake.
It was a slow tide pulling me out, inch by inch, disguised as devotion, disguised as duty.

I spent the years of that marriage surviving, and survival, for me, was an art form.
I learned to read the wind, to sense a shift in the air before it arrived.
I built lighthouses from logic, maps out of routines.
I could navigate tension before it hit the shore.
I was fluent in storms.

And in that way, I thrived.
I became the kind of woman who could hold everything together while everything else fell apart.
I wore resilience like salt on my skin, a quiet proof that I could endure anything.

But when I no longer had to be the version of myself that survived, I didn’t know how to be.

The sea went still, and I mistook silence for danger.
Every wave that didn’t rise made me restless.
I kept scanning the horizon for wreckage, waiting for something, anything to crash.

Because that’s what happens when you live too long at sea: the chaos becomes your compass.
You forget what it means to be anchored.

So when the wind died down, I just drifted.
Oars idle.
Hands tight around the edges of a boat that no longer had anywhere to go.

The calm should have felt like mercy, but it felt like mourning.
I’d spent years learning how to weather the storm, and not a moment learning how to land.

The sea was quiet, and it terrified me.
Without the waves, who was I?
Without the constant pull, what was I supposed to move toward?

I kept circling the open water, searching for proof that I was still alive — forgetting that sometimes, living isn’t movement at all.
It’s the stillness after.
It’s the choice to lower the oars, to let the water hold you until you can remember what it feels like to trust it.

But still, I couldn’t stay there.
Something in me kept asking, Now what?

If I wasn’t surviving anymore, what was I supposed to do with the quiet that survival left behind?
I wasn’t looking for healing or ritual, I was looking for direction.
For a map.
For something to remind me how to belong to myself again.

And maybe that’s why I paid attention that day when a video about an old ritual, The Twelve Magical Nights, drifted across my screen.

At first, it felt like nothing. Just another passing current in the scroll.
But the story of those thirteen wishes, twelve to release, one to keep, stayed with me.
It didn’t feel like magic. It felt like a memory.

A whisper saying, You’ve forgotten how to wish because you’ve forgotten how to listen.

That was the moment I began piecing together what would become The 13 Reflections, not a ritual, not a project, but a map made of questions. A way to return to myself, one tide at a time.

This is where it begins.

The first reflection. The first return.

Homecoming is about remembering where you land after years of drifting.
It’s the moment your feet touch ground again, shaky, soft, uncertain, but real.
It’s the breath after the storm. The stillness after survival.

Homecoming is the grounding, the reconnection to your body, your breath, your belonging.
It’s the part of you that whispers, you are still here, even when you don’t quite believe it yet.

Resource is the well, the nourishment, the people, the practices that refill you.
It’s what sustains you when you finally stop moving.
The quiet knowing that you don’t have to hold everything alone.

Together, they ask one thing of you: to come home.

Not to the life you had before the storm, but to the one that waited beneath it.

Because survival teaches you how to keep the boat afloat, but peace asks you to step ashore.
To plant your feet.
To feel the weight of your own body again.
To trust that the ground can hold you.

That’s where we begin.
Coming home to be planted.
With resources.
Remember that you already have what you need; it’s just been buried under the noise.

Because sometimes the most radical act isn’t moving forward.
It’s standing still long enough to feel where you are.

Reflection & Questions

Coming home isn’t a destination; it’s a remembering.
It’s looking around at the life you’ve built and realizing some of it doesn’t belong to you anymore.
It’s feeling the ache of stillness and learning that it’s not punishment, it’s permission.

This week, pay attention to where your feet are.
How they meet the ground.
What your body tells you when you finally stop rushing.
You don’t need to fix anything, just notice what’s real.

These questions aren’t meant to be answered neatly. They’re meant to loosen something, to make space for the truth underneath.

Questions to Sit With: pick only one that is calling to you the most.

• What parts of you have been waiting for you to come back?

• Where do you still feel like you’re surviving, even though the storm has passed?

• When was the last time you felt rooted — not just safe, but alive?

• What sustains you when the noise fades?

• What does “home” feel like in your body today?

When something stirs… stay with it.
Don’t rush to move on or make sense of it.
This part is where you start asking why.

Take your question and keep asking why until you reach what hurts, and then stay there.

The Question

Where do I still feel like I’m surviving, even though the storm has passed?

Example:

“I still feel like I’m surviving when the house is quiet.”

Why? Because quiet feels unsafe.

Why? Because that’s when I notice how tired I am.

Why? Because I never learned how to rest without guilt.

Why? Because calm was never proof that things were okay.

Why? Because I only ever felt safe when I was needed.

Why? Because being needed made me feel valuable.

Why? Because if I wasn’t holding everything together, I didn’t know who I was.

Why? Because my worth was measured in what I carried, not in who I was when I set it down.

Why? Because stillness made space for feelings I didn’t have time to feel.

Why? Because if I stopped long enough to feel, I might have realized how much I’d lost.

Keep going until you can’t ask why anymore.
That’s where the truth lives.

When you finally reach the last why, stop digging.
Sit with what’s there.

🌱 The Root
What you discover at the bottom of all that asking isn’t a problem, it’s a truth waiting to be seen.
Example: “I don’t trust calm.”

Let that be enough for now.
Don’t fix it. Don’t patch it up with positivity.
Just name it.

✨ The Wish

From that root, shape your wish.
Not a goal. Not an affirmation. A longing.

Example: “I wish to trust stillness to believe that calm can hold me.”

That’s how you begin building your thirteen wishes.
Not from the surface, but from the soil.

Write yours down somewhere you can return to it, a journal, a scrap of paper, the notes app in your phone.
This isn’t about manifesting something new.
It’s about remembering what you’ve been asking for all along.

We’ve come full circle, quite literally.

The heart of The 13 Reflections draws from two old teachings that found their way to me when I needed direction most:

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the familiar pyramid we were taught to climb, began as something very different. Its inspiration came from the Blackfoot people, whose understanding of human fulfillment wasn’t a ladder to ascend, but a circle of reciprocity and balance. Not about reaching the top, but belonging to the whole.

And then there’s The Twelve Magical Nights, an old pagan ritual that carries us between one year and the next. Thirteen wishes written, twelve burned, one kept a promise to the self. A way of saying to the universe, I trust you with what’s beyond me, and I’ll take responsibility for what’s mine.

These are the quiet guides that shaped this work: the circle and the ritual.
Together, they remind us that reflection is more than looking back; it’s an act of remembering our place in something larger.

And that’s where the deep work begins.

Homecoming — The Deep Practice (for paid subscribers)

You’ve named the truth.
Now it’s time to tend to it.

This part of the process is about creating practices that help you tend the wish, not force it, not rush it, but make space for it to root into daily life.
If reflection is the remembering, practice is the returning.

Inside the Deep Practice, we’ll move from thought to embodiment, from question to quiet action. Each week, these sessions offer:

• A creative ritual to help your wish take form

• A reflective tarot layout for deeper insight

• Practices to reconnect you to your body and sense of home

• Prompts to expand your wish into something lived, not just written

This is the deeper work — the slow, sacred tending.
The kind that builds the map, one question at a time.

So if you feel the pull, stay a little longer.
Put your feet on the ground.
Breathe.

Join me in the Deep Practice below.

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A few days before my parents took me out for my birthday, I called them in the middle of a breakdown. I had just gotten off the phone with my ex. The man who could turn silence into punishment.

For days he hadn’t answered my texts or calls. All I’d asked was if the little kids could stay at his house overnight on my birthday so I could have one evening. Just one. To be something other than mother, caretaker, or buffer. But silence was always his answer. It was how he taught me obedience.

When I couldn’t take it anymore, I reached out to his mother. He still lives in her basement. I asked if she’d be okay with the kids sleeping over and told her he hadn’t responded to me in days. She said she’d check with him. That’s what finally made him call. Not right away, but a day later.

His voice was calm, almost gentle. That practiced, careful tone that always made me question my instincts. He told me the kids should stay home, that they’d be “more comfortable in their own beds.” He said he could …

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Now, let’s be honest. I’m fantastic at dreaming things up. You want a new idea? A creative plan? A half-mapped-out vision board? I got you. But actually doing the thing? Finishing what I start? That’s the part where I tend to… quietly disappear.

I am what you’d call a highly enthusiastic starter. I love the thrill of a fresh project. I love a blank notebook, an untouched room, a Pinterest board full of ideas and potential. But somewhere around week two—or like, day four—I begin to fizzle. Reality sets in. The initial high wears off. I lose steam.

Right now, I have at least four unfinished projects that are this close to being done. Like the small section of wall downstairs that still needs to be painted yellow to match the rest of the room. It’s probably a 30-minute task. Tops. But the idea of pulling everything back out—the paint tray, the brushes, the drop cloths—makes me want to crawl under a blanket and pretend it doesn't exist.

And then there’s my rose garden. One side is fully mulched. Gorgeous. Done. The other side? Naked dirt. The bags of mulch are sitting right next to it like, “Girl… please.” All I have to do is pick them up, cut them open, and dump them out. But even that feels like too much.

And still, I created a 52-week prompt list. For an entire year.
Like, okay… sure. Let’s see how this goes.
(Cue the part of me that already wants to bail by week three.)

But I think part of the overwhelm—the resistance, the stall—isn’t just laziness. It’s this deeper thing I keep bumping up against:
A lack of inspiration.
And a low-key addiction to scrolling.

It’s so much easier to sink into the couch and scroll endlessly than it is to do anything. Because at some point, I started asking myself: What’s the point? Why paint the wall? Why mulch the garden? Why write the post? Why finish the thing?

It’s not depression, exactly.
But it’s definitely disconnection.

A disconnection from myself. From the real world. From the joy of doing something just for the sake of doing it.

Screens give us an illusion of living. Of connection. Of creativity. We get to consume other people’s lives, their ideas, their beauty, their finished projects—and call it “close enough.”

But it’s not.
Not for me.
Not anymore.

That’s why I started this experiment. That’s why I made the prompt jar. That’s why I’m showing up here.

Because I’m ready to step back into my life.
To live again, instead of just observing everyone else doing it.

So on Sunday, after I introduced INSPIRE Me Weekly, I pulled my first prompt.

And of course—of course—the universe handed me:
Do Something for Your Inner Child.

I rolled my eyes so hard I saw my own brain.

Because if there’s one part of me that never gives up, it’s my inner child. She’s always tugging at my sleeve, asking me to come play, to color outside the lines, to remember how it felt to be wild and weird and full of wonder.

And I?
I’m very good at telling her, “Not right now.”
Or “Maybe later.”
Or “Can you just… be quiet while I scroll myself into oblivion?”

Being a Scorpio, my whole life has kind of been a masterclass in deep emotional work. Shadow diving. Healing wounds. Reclaiming parts of myself that got buried in the chaos of growing up.

And honestly? I’m a little tired of healing.

So when I pulled that prompt, I didn’t want to make it heavy. I didn’t want to dive into her pain, or write her another letter, or cry it out. I wanted to play. I wanted to remember her joy.

So I asked myself:
What if this week isn’t about fixing her?
What if it’s about having fun with her?

→ This next part is for paid subscribers.
I’m sharing the full list I created for the prompt “Do Something for Your Inner Child”—complete with small, medium, and bold ideas—plus how it’s actually playing out in real life.

Spoiler: it’s been equal parts chaos, joy, and exactly what I didn’t know I needed.

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I didn’t mean to get so disconnected.

But somewhere between all the scrolling, surviving, and overthinking—I slipped away from myself.
I stopped noticing. I stopped creating. I stopped feeling lit up by my own life.

I kept calling it “gathering inspiration,” but really, I was just zoning out. Consuming more than I could process. Waiting for something to spark.
But the more I consumed, the more numb I felt. The more ideas I saved, the less I acted on any of them.

Eventually, I wrote it down in my morning pages: I’m uninspired.
Not just creatively blocked—disconnected. From wonder. From energy. From myself.

But naming it made something shift.
Almost instantly, the ideas came rushing in—tiny sparks, gentle nudges, things I might try just to feel again. A list started forming. A rhythm. A way back.

So I made this:
Not a challenge. Not a checklist. Just a simple weekly prompt. A soft invitation to notice more. To try something different. To remember who I am when I’…

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I spent two hours the other day writing a piece about walking my dogs and thinking about generational trauma—

how that shit gets passed down until someone finally says, “Fine. I’ll feel it. I’ll talk about it.” I wrote it, read it back, tweaked and reworked, but there was still a disconnect I couldn’t quite name.

Before I could even sit with that disconnect, the front door flew open. The kids were back from their dad’s, loud, happy and home and came stumbling into my room causing me to closed my laptop and get them ready for bed.

As I was lying with Annie in her bed in her the dark room, I remembered a note in my phone—something I’d started a while ago, not realizing it was about the exact same thing I had just spent forever writing. I opened it. The screen lit up my face while she drifted beside me. And I thought, Oh. This. This is what I was trying to say. And I was annoyed.

Annoyed that I’m still having the same feelings I’ve already had a thousand times. Annoyed that this …

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Want to hear this piece the way it was meant to be heard? I recorded myself reading it just for paid subscribers. Upgrade to listen, then scroll to the bottom of the post to hear me read it.

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I still have photos of Cody and me hung all over the house, even though in just a few weeks, it’ll be a year since I asked him to leave. He still comes over, walking through an un-knocked door whenever he needs to, and the kids and I don’t flinch at the sight of him.

The other day, when Annie had a sleepover, he came by to grab something—do something—and her friend, knowing that Annie goes to her dad’s house every Tuesday and Thursday, whispered, Why is your dad here?

I overheard and casually said, “Oh, because he’s just hanging out with me.” Nonchalantly. Like it’s completely normal to have the man you’re divorcing stop by for a quick chat between friends.

Her friend also had a dad’s house and a mom’s house—one that didn’t seem to have this weird middle ground we seem to be stuck in. So for her, she was bracing for an impact that felt inevitable. But instead, Cody and I just laughed and chatted in the kitchen about something or other before he left for his other job.

I like this middle we’re in, this building upon our history to be best friends. Him? Well, not so much. He tells me all the time that he doesn’t want to be best friends, that he’s still holding onto hope that this could merge back into a relationship—one that allows us to continue our marriage. Maybe that’s why I haven’t taken down the photos. Because to do so would be to accept the undoing of us as something permanent.

But his hope isn’t real for me. I know the way things were is not the way they can continue to be. And yet, I’m enjoying this in-between space. I get the best parts of him—the laughing in the kitchen, the deep talks, the occasional sex—without the weight of carrying him. He leaves, and I get to relish the solitude of that.

I talked to my therapist about it, in depth, because I worry that maintaining our relationship this way is something that needs to be unpacked. But she has no more advice than I do. She’s mostly just fascinated—fascinated by my ability to explore this power play with the person who once took so much power from me.

For the past few weeks, he’s been coming over to help redo the basement flooring—the same one that had to be replaced after the flood in October. I spent weeks fixing and reinstalling the drywall on my own. But when it came to the flooring, I hesitated. The thought of making so many precise cuts made me nervous. I mentioned it to him in passing, and the next thing I knew, we were at the hardware store, picking out supplies.

Now, we spend the late evenings downstairs, working side by side as the kids sleep upstairs. He cuts and pieces the flooring together while I hand him tools, our conversation drifting between deep talks and comfortable silence.

This is all I ever wanted when we were married—the ability to rely on him for things like this. When we first bought this house, there was so much to do. Flooring to replace, carpet to rip up, things that needed fixing and tweaking. I begged him to help, but he always had a reason why he couldn’t. He was working too much. Too exhausted. Paying for a move he never wanted to make in the first place.

So I stopped asking. I did what I could on my own, and when I couldn’t, I turned to our friend Johnny, who never hesitated. He’d willingly drop his weekend plans, his quiet evenings, to pull up carpet, lay down new flooring, fix what needed fixing. And while he worked, I sat in those rooms having the same deep conversations Cody never made space for.

Now, after everything, Cody is here, doing the things I once begged him to do. And it messes with me, makes me question everything. One evening, as we worked, I finally asked him:

“Why now? Why couldn’t you be who I needed then, but you’re willing to be who I need now?”

He hesitated, the silence stretching between us, thick with something unspoken. I could see it in the way his jaw tightened, the way his hands stilled, like he was searching for an answer he hadn’t let himself confront before.

Finally, he exhaled. “I was afraid,” he admitted. “Afraid I wouldn’t do it right. Afraid I’d fail. I didn’t have the confidence—not just in this, but in anything it took to grow alongside you.”

He told me it started with the fence—the one he rebuilt after that big storm a few years before we separated. That was the first time he realized he could take on those kinds of projects, that maybe his hesitation had never been about time or exhaustion but about fear. Fear of failing, of not doing it right, of not being enough.

And then there was the fight. The night I snapped, when I was begging him—again—to see me, to help me. When I grabbed the book Fair Play and threw it at him. Told him to read it. Demanded it. Because I was done explaining, done justifying, done carrying it all on my own.

He hadn’t said much. Just left for work like always. But that night, as he sat in his car before clocking in, he finally downloaded the audiobook. And for the first time, he listened.

And that, he said, was when things shifted. As he worked, he listened. And little by little, he started to see—not just the tasks left undone, but the weight I had been carrying. The exhaustion of always having to ask, always having to plan, always having to manage, always having to know.

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He told me he was sorry. That he wished he had seen it sooner. That he was finally becoming the person I had needed.

And I cried.

Not because I wanted him back, but because hearing it now—after all this time, after all the ways I had learned to live without it—felt like grieving something I didn’t even realize I was still holding. The weight of every moment I had spent waiting for him, of every fight, every quiet disappointment. I asked more questions, pushing into the past, into the memories I thought I had made peace with. Why this? Why that? And for the first time, he answered me.

He opened up in a way he never had before, and for a moment, I saw him beyond the frustration of those experiences. I saw the fear, the insecurity, the things that kept him from stepping up. But the more he spoke, the more the grief built inside me—because no matter how much I finally understood, no matter how much he had grown, we could never redo those moments. They were set in stone, unchangeable. And because of that, I knew, with certainty, that I could never truly be with him again.

Because even if he had become the man I once needed, I would always carry the weight of who he wasn’t when I needed him most. And that was too heavy to allow us to start again.

I told him that.

I told him that maybe he could take all this growth, all this newfound understanding, and bring it into something new with someone else. That he could be better, for another person.

But as for me? Right now, I don’t want to carry the burden of another.

I told him that I love being with myself. That I don’t want to take on the task of mothering another man/person into becoming a partner. That if I ever let someone into my life again, they will have to come into it with value—not with potential. That I will not be someone’s lesson in how to love, how to communicate, how to show up.

They will have to come already knowing.

And he just sat with that. Let it settle between us.

Because I think, for the first time, he saw it too.

And yet—he’s still coming around.

We still text. We still talk. He still walks through my door, and I still don’t stop him. There are nights when I hear my phone buzz with his name, and without thinking, I pick it up.

I tell myself it’s just habit. That after so many years of being intertwined, it’s only natural that I still reach for him. That breaking away completely would feel unnatural, like cutting off a limb just because it no longer works the way it used to.

But if I’m being honest, it’s not just that.

It’s the friendship. Or maybe, it’s the fact that the friendship is all I have left to salvage.

Because for years, I carried this belief that if nothing else, we should be best friends. That if we couldn’t be partners, we could at least be this. That everything we built, everything we shared, couldn’t just dissolve into nothing. That would feel like too much loss, too much finality.

Maybe I need him to be my best friend because the alternative feels unbearable—that he could go from being everything to being just another person I used to know.

Maybe I don’t want to admit that some things can’t be salvaged, that some endings are just endings.

Or maybe I just don’t want to feel like I was wrong about him.

That I wasted all those years on someone who was never going to meet me where I stood. That I spent too much time waiting for someone who only arrived once I was already gone.

I don’t know.

But I do know this: I don’t want him back. And yet, I don’t know how to let him go.

I don’t know if I’m holding on to him.

Or if I’m just holding on to the hope that all of it—everything we lived, everything we fought through—was worth something.

And maybe, until I figure that out, I’ll keep answering when he calls.

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