the cure

perhaps the cruelest kind of distance is the one that slowly changes the language between two people who never stopped caring.

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there is a grief that doesn't announce itself.

it doesn't arrive with a goodbye, a slammed door, or the end of a relationship. it slips quietly into ordinary days, disguising itself as delayed replies, postponed conversations, and the strange habit of checking your phone without remembering why.

nothing has ended, and somehow everything feels different.

no one warns you that longing can exist without loss.

that you can miss someone who is still very much in your life. that affection doesn't always fade before loneliness begins.

people often mistake distance for geography, as if it could be measured in miles, time zones, or flight durations.

while actually.. distance begins the moment your lives stop moving at the same pace, when one person starts surviving deadlines while the other begins surviving uncertainty. neither chooses it. neither deserves it.

yet somehow, both end up apologizing for things neither of them can control.

I used to believe waiting was an act of love.

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maybe it still is.

but no one talks about what waiting eventually does to the mind. how it teaches you to search for meaning inside silence, how every unread message starts feeling intentional, and how a single notification can dictate the emotional climate of an entire day.

the silence itself isn't painful. it's everything the silence allows your imagination to become.

the saddest thing is that nothing was technically wrong.

there was still kindness. still care. still gentle words squeezed between exhausting days. there were apologies that didn't need to exist, promises to make time, and reminders to eat, to rest, and to take care.

love hadn’t disappeared.

availability had.

and those are not the same thing.

the internet rarely understands that distinction.

it tells us that if someone truly cares, they'll always find time. that the right person will never leave us waiting. that consistency is the only acceptable language of love.

maybe.

or maybe we are far more complicated than beautifully designed quote cards.

maybe sometimes love arrives exhausted.

maybe sometimes affection wears muddy shoes and apologizes before saying hello. maybe sometimes people are doing everything they can while still leaving someone they cherish feeling alone.

and then I stopped reacting to reality.

I started reacting to stories.

stories I wrote between replies. stories that social media happily completed for me.

"if they cared..."

"if you mattered..."

"if you were enough..."

none of those stories knew either of us.

yet I let them narrate a relationship they had never witnessed.

I overthink a lot, I wish I wasn’t

looking back, I don't think I was actually waiting for messages.

I was waiting for reassurance. for certainty. for something that couldn't be delivered through perfect response times anyway.

because reassurance has never really been about frequency.

it's about trust.

and trust becomes surprisingly difficult when anxiety learns how to imitate intuition.

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that's the part no one tells you.

an anxious heart doesn't always lie, but it rarely speaks the whole truth. it gathers evidence selectively. it remembers every delay, every cancelled plan, every unread message, and quietly forgets every gentle conversation that came before.

they are, probably the cure.

the place where my nervous system finally exhaled. the voice that made difficult days feel survivable. the presence that softened every sharp edge life had left behind.

until one day I realized something uncomfortable.

if my peace only exists in another person’s presence, then it was never really mine.

healing wasn't learning how to care less.

it wasn't pretending I didn't miss them. it wasn't becoming emotionally unavailable just to avoid disappointment.

healing was learning to hold two truths at once; that someone can love you deeply and still be temporarily unavailable. that longing doesn’t automatically mean abandonment. that silence isn’t always rejection.

sometimes it's simply life being louder than either of you wanted it to be.

maybe that’s why I called this the cure.

cause I spent so long believing healing would arrive through another person, while actually healing began the moment I stopped demanding certainty from circumstances that could never promise it.

perhaps love was never supposed to erase anxiety.

perhaps love was only meant to remind us that anxiety isn't always telling the truth.

sometimes the greatest act of love isn’t refusing to let go of someone else. sometimes it’s refusing to let fear rewrite everything you already know about them.