Time moved, but I stayed.
I didn't move on. I didn’t bounce back. I existed. Like background music no one listens to anymore. I worked, I slept, I breathed, but I wasn’t living at me being me. My body felt like an abandoned house she left without locking the door, and now I was haunted by her fingerprints on everything.
Still, I kept quiet. I didn’t beg. I didn’t reach out. I let the silence stretch, until it became its own kind of language. The kind that only those who've been left behind understand.
But something started to shift.
It was small at first. Her posts stopped being about joy and sunshine. The captions turned shorter. Her eyes in the photos looked tired, like someone searching for something that kept slipping away. Her circle seemed smaller. The smiles that once came so easily started to feel forced. And I watched it happen without saying a word.
One night, a friend of hers messaged me. Out of nowhere. Just a simple “Hey, how are you holding up?”
Strange.
She never liked that I was close to her people. She kept me to herself, guarded like a secret she never wanted the world to keep. So I responded, cautiously.
“I’m surviving. Why?”
Her friend waited, then typed slowly.
“Just checking. She hasn’t been herself lately. She mentioned you a few times. Quietly.”
I didn’t ask more. I didn’t want to know, but part of me already did.
Because pain, when it circles back, doesn’t always scream. Sometimes, it knocks gently, wearing the same perfume it used to.
Later that week, I saw her walking through a market. Alone. No ring on her finger. Hair tied back, no makeup, hoodie up like she didn’t want to be seen. She looked smaller. Not thinner. Just… dimmer. Like someone who once glowed now struggling to light a candle within herself.
I didn’t speak to her. I walked past. I kept my pace steady, heart racing but head clear. But I felt it. Her glance. The way her eyes locked onto me for just a second too long. Like recognition and regret had a child and named it silence.
She looked like she wanted to speak. Like there was a word stuck in her throat clawing to get out.
But she didn’t.
And neither did I.
Instead, I walked into the evening, and she stayed in that still market like a ghost.
Something told me that her world was beginning to crack.
I don’t know the details. I don’t need to. But something shifted.
The same silence that used to live in my chest now lives in hers.
The same weight that crushed my ribs now presses against her.
She thought I was a chapter. A pit stop. A detour.
But now she’s the one replaying memories. She’s the one whose phone lights up at night, hoping for my name to appear.
Only it won’t.
Not anymore.
And maybe that’s where karma begins. Not in revenge. Not in shouting. But in stillness. In the quiet realization that you ruined something that loved you. That you set fire to a heart that never wanted to stop beating for you.
And now?
Now I wait. Not for her. Not for answers. But for the rest of the story to write itself.
Because I can feel it.
Karma is coming.
It always does.
Quietly.
In her sleep.
In her dreams.
In her own reflection.
And when it finally arrives, I won’t be there to witness it.
But she’ll feel it.
And she’ll know.