The gate closes with a sound like the world holding its breath.

One second Mike is shouting your name, fingers brushing yours through the tearing air and then the rift snaps shut, leaving nothing but scorched ground and silence between you.

They tell you it’s permanent.

You start leaving messages the way you always have. A piece of chalk hidden behind the old middle school gym, your handwriting small and careful: "Still here. Don’t stop looking." You tuck folded notes into the pages of his old campaign manuals, pressed flat beneath loose floorboards in the basement. You redraw his maps, marking places you hope he’ll check, places you hope he remembers.

On the other side, Mike does the same.

He scratches your initials into the side of a rusted car in the Upside Down, traces your name into ash with shaking fingers. He pins notes to the corkboard that shouldn’t exist anymore, talking to you like you’re just in the next room. Sometimes he reads them out loud, just in case sound travels where bodies can’t.

Days turn into weeks. Weeks into something heavier.

You find his messages eventually, mirrored in strange ways. A chalk mark smeared where yours once was. A map altered, paths crossing in places that shouldn’t connect. Proof that somehow, impossibly, he’s still reaching for you.

You press your palm to the wall where the gate used to be and whisper his name like a promise.