Nine.
0016.
Avery sat at her desk that morning with the quiet understanding that it had been nine months since she last heard his voice. Nine months since she chose silence over the slow, private unraveling they had done. Nine months of cold turkey. Of waking up every day and not reaching. Of surviving urge after urge like a series of small fires she learned to step through without stopping.
She thought she had metabolized it all… the loss, the love, the years that never quite formed a shape she could name. But it was heavy. The hurt was something that lived somewhere behind her sternum, so deep down inside of her. Time felt really cruel. Why is it that memories do whatever they want, and whenever? They arrive unannounced, dressed like any other day, and then split you open when you’re not looking.
Before she knew it, she was crying.
The tears didn’t well in her eyes, or tip-toe in. They weren’t gentle and couldn’t be dabbed away discreetly. The tears kept falling and they made her feel foolish and completely undone.
So she left her desk and her coat behind and braved the cold, and pouring rain to privately cry in her car. She didn’t need the judgement, or the questions, or the not-so-subtle stares.
Avery found herself in the drivers seat, phone in hand, and frantically searching “my love” as a keyword to the album that met her and her grief.
She needed to feel. To pull something that felt ancient to the surface. Using her phone like it’s a time machine, scrolling back to a time when she might land on a version of herself that felt familiar, and loved.
Of course she told her friends she’d deleted everything.
The texts. The photos. The voicenotes. All of it.
And she meant it when she said it. Truly. But grief was pulling the strings, even then when the breakup was new, it was acting with its own sense of preservation. Somehow the most important things always survive the storm. Love makes a way, no matter what and she’ll never stop believing that. Even when it was neatly tucked away in “The Cloud”, love and memory wait in carefully marked folders. In archived threads. In places you don’t remember putting them, but remember immediately when its time to look.
She spent more time than she’d ever admit digging through the virtual crates.
Old conversations. Screenshots she didn’t remember taking. Photos she remembered too well. Excavating a love she was supposed to be over. It wasn’t always a love she was proud of, but it was still love. A love that when it was good, it was everything. And nothing was necessarily wrong between them, but Avery never quite got enough of it. Maybe it was timing, but he couldn’t show up how she needed. Instead, it became the kind of love people tell you to move on from, as if it were a location instead of a feeling.
She searched vigorously—almost desperately through the old photos. Avery didn’t need answers or closure. She wanted closeness. For proof that it had been real. To remember she hadn’t imagined the way he once saw her. She loved the way his attention had wrapped around her like shelter. Like safety. Like something she could rest inside.
She lingered in the what-ifs.
What if she had asked for less?
What if she had waited longer?
What if she never allowed herself to fall?
What if he makes his way back to her?
Heartbreak spread itself out quickly once she gave it room, and she gave it plenty. Her heart felt so tender she was sure it could bruise from the inside out.
It was the voicenotes that finally undid her. They always began the same way, “hey babygirl”. It was casual and intimate all at once, like a hand resting at the small of her back. Hearing his voice felt like breaking a rule she had made for her own survival. Like stepping into a room she had boarded up carefully, knowing exactly why it had been closed. But it hurt so good.
Needing to hear his voice was what sent her to the car.
She sat in the driver’s seat while rain came down, blurring the windshield until the world outside softened. She let the tears come without correcting them. Let her shoulders shake. Let herself miss him without editing the feeling into something more acceptable. Without turning it into strength or meaning or growth.
Eventually, the wave passed.
Or maybe it just loosened its grip.
She took a breath when it became too much. Then another. Shallow at first. Careful. She reminded herself that she had chosen this silence for a reason. That loving him had once felt like home, and later like waiting in a room where the lights never fully turned on.
When there was nothing left to search for, or nothing left to feel—she wiped her face, steadied her hands, and stepped back into the day.
She walked back to work like someone who knew how to survive things quietly. Her sleeves were still damp from the rain, the fabric clinging to her wrists. On her desk, a half-finished cup of coffee sat abandoned and cold.
The world hadn’t paused for her quiet, private breaking.
Emails waited. Deadlines blinked patiently. Somewhere down the hall, someone laughed at something she couldn’t quite hear. The ordinary noise of living pressed in around her, relentless and indifferent.
She sat down anyway.
Her chest still felt tender, but steadier now. Like a bruise she had learned not to press. She answered what needed answering. Took notes she would barely remember later. Let the rhythm of the day move her forward inch by inch, minute by minute.
Grief, Avery was learning, didn’t always arrive as devastation. Today it slipped in, asked to be felt, and then left her to carry on with the rest of the day as if nothing had happened at all.
It returned to the boxes neatly tucked in the corners of an virtual storage unit that held years worth of a relationship that she could visit with a password and a quiet moment.
She didn’t reach out.
But Avery silently hoped… and prayed—that he would. And thought that maybe he was thinking of her too.
Maybe.
*deep sigh*
♥️.