You still dream of her. Not often—just enough for it to hurt.

It’s been a year since Hysilens left. Not the first time, but the last. The end you both knew was coming, the one you rehearsed in arguments and silences long before it arrived. You had been together for three years, through the quiet chaos of building something that felt like forever and watching it collapse in the space of a breath.

You tried again once. A year after the first ending, like two ghosts trying to resurrect a life that had already turned to dust. It lasted two months. You both knew it was temporary, but you held onto it anyway—desperation disguised as hope. There was no explosion this time, no cruel words, no grand finale. Just the slow erosion of what little remained between you.

Then she met someone else.

You found out without looking for it—one of those small cruelties of the universe, where a photo appears on a mutual feed, or a friend mentions her name with a casual “She seems really happy lately.” You didn’t ask for details. You never do. You just carry the image in silence: Hysilens, smiling at someone who isn’t you.

They’ve been together for months now. Long enough for you to know it’s real. Long enough for you to realize she’s moved on completely.

You, on the other hand, haven’t.

You tell yourself you’re fine. You go out. You work. You laugh. But at night, when everything slows down, the smallest things summon her—the sound of rain against your window, the scent of black tea, the color of her old sweater folded somewhere in the back of your drawer. Your brain still conjures her like a habit it refuses to break.

Sometimes, in dreams, it’s like she never left. She’s beside you, half-asleep, her hair falling over her shoulder as you trace her collarbone with your thumb. She hums softly, the way she used to when she was too tired to talk. And for those fleeting moments, you forget the ending. You forget the distance, the new lover, the silence. It feels like the world is whole again—until you wake up and remember it isn’t.

There’s a cruel intimacy in remembering someone who has forgotten you. You think about how she used to kiss you, slow and deliberate, as if memorizing you. You wonder if she kisses differently now. If she still hums when she’s nervous. If she ever mentions your name when no one’s around.

You’ve deleted her number, her photos, the messages you swore you wouldn’t reread. But memory isn’t digital—it hides in your body, in muscle memory and instinct. When you walk past the café where she first told you she loved you, you still feel her hand ghosting over yours. When you hear her favorite song in a store, you still pause.

It’s pathetic, maybe. To still care when she doesn’t. To still ache for someone who has already built a new life. But heartbreak isn’t symmetrical—it never ends at the same time for both people. She got closure. You got silence.

You tell yourself she’s happier now, and maybe she is. You even want that for her, in a distant, self-destructive way. But a part of you still whispers: why wasn’t I enough for that happiness? why couldn’t she stay?

The nights are worse when you dream of her voice. Sometimes she’s laughing. Sometimes she’s crying. Sometimes she’s looking at you with the same soft expression she used to have before she said “I can’t do this anymore.”

You wake up sweating, heartbroken all over again, reaching for someone who isn’t there.

You haven’t spoken since the day she left the second time. A clean break, contact zero. She made it look easy. You, on the other hand, still carry her like a phantom limb—gone, but never really gone.

Everyone says time heals. Maybe it does. But they never tell you that healing isn’t about forgetting—it’s about learning how to live with the memory without letting it destroy you. You think you’re getting there, slowly. But then a dream comes, or a song plays, or someone with her same laugh walks by, and suddenly you’re back where you started—three years of love condensed into one sharp, unbearable second.

You wonder if she ever dreams of you.