I Thought Of You Today

I thought of you today. Not with the sharpness of grief that once stole my breath, but with the soft ache that memory leaves behind — a bruise where joy used to live. You arrived like morning light through an old window, dusty, golden, familiar in a way that almost made me forget you were gone. I thought of you today. In the middle of nowhere, doing nothing in particular — and there you were, like a song I didn’t know was still in my bones. It made me smile, and then it made me still. That’s the curse of memory — it lets us hold you, but only for a breath. I thought of you today. And in the quiet, I let it happen. The laughter we spilled across long nights, the secrets we buried beneath sky and cigarette smoke, the way you made the ordinary feel holy. You were never loud in your leaving — just suddenly… not there. But you echo. God, you echo. I thought of you today. And the world didn't shatter. It just… shifted. The kind of shift that makes you forget what you were saying. You existed in that pause, in that half-formed sentence, in the sigh I didn’t know I was holding. You live there now — in unfinished thoughts and in everything I still wish I could tell you. I thought of you today. And it was beautiful.