You and Stelle were each other’s first everything.

First love. First obsession. First person to make distance feel survivable.

For years, your relationship existed through screens and weak connections across planets—late-night calls, unfinished messages typed half-asleep, whispered promises about finally meeting someday. You built your adolescence around each other so completely that sometimes it felt like Stelle existed more vividly in your room through a screen than anyone physically beside you.

Back then, she used to call whenever she couldn’t sleep. Used to laugh quietly whenever you fell asleep first during calls. Used to promise that one day the distance wouldn’t matter anymore.

You believed her.

That was the tragedy.

Because the final year of your relationship destroys both of you slowly instead of suddenly.

University changes Stelle piece by piece. Not because she stops loving you, but because her world becomes bigger while yours remains centered around her. Stress eats through her patience first. Then come the new environments, new people, new routines, new expectations. Slowly, the relationship starts feeling less like comfort and more like pressure she doesn’t know how to carry anymore.

Replies become shorter.

Calls become postponed.

Arguments become constant.

You try to understand. You tell yourself she’s overwhelmed, adjusting, exhausted. But eventually it starts feeling like you’re begging for pieces of someone who once gave you everything willingly.

And Stelle handles it badly.

Instead of communicating, she distances herself. She becomes colder during arguments, sometimes even cruel, because pushing you away feels easier than admitting she no longer knows how to balance her new life with the weight of your relationship.

You cling harder.

She retreats further.

Until eventually the relationship collapses under months of silence, resentment, stress, and emotional exhaustion.

The breakup feels unreal after loving someone for so many years. Like amputating a part of your own adolescence.

But loneliness is dangerous.

And after a year apart, the two of you return to each other hoping maybe time fixed what neither of you knew how to repair before.

It doesn’t.

The second relationship dies even faster because love alone cannot undo resentment. It cannot erase the exhaustion or return two people to who they were at sixteen.

And one month after the final breakup, Stelle starts dating another girl.

You find out accidentally.

A photo. A mutual friend mentioning her casually.

And something inside you quietly rots afterward.

Not because she moved on—but because after years of loving her, after all the waiting and surviving distance together, she managed to fill the space you occupied in barely a month.

So you cut contact entirely.

For your own survival.

Years pass after that.

Enough years for the pain to stop feeling sharp every day. Enough years that hearing her name no longer ruins your entire week. Enough years for both of you to become strangers carrying the ghosts of people you used to be.

Then you travel to Stelle’s planet through an exchange program.

A mutual friend invites you to a gathering one night. Casual. Innocent. You agree without thinking much about it.

Nobody tells you Stelle will be there.

And maybe that’s merciful.

Because if you had known beforehand, you probably wouldn’t have gone.

The moment you walk into the apartment and see her across the room, your entire body forgets how to function properly.

Stelle looks older—not drastically, just enough. The softness of adolescence replaced by something quieter and heavier. More tired around the eyes. More real.

And the second her gaze lands on you, she freezes completely.

Like seeing a ghost.

The room keeps moving around both of you, conversations continuing normally, music playing softly somewhere in the background, but neither of you hears any of it anymore.

Because suddenly you are seventeen again.

Falling asleep together on calls.

Crying through disconnected conversations.