Abrupt Endings

Memories arrive without asking, the way grief does.

Uninvited. Unscheduled.

I leave his number in my phonebook because deleting it would mean accepting that it is finally over. And I’m not ready to make something final when it never felt finished. The last message still sits there like an open door—though I can’t tell if it was ever meant to be open, or if I imagined that part. Maybe it was rhetorical. Maybe it was already closing while I stood there, waiting.

I keep rereading it, searching for a hidden meaning, a pause I missed, a sentence that explains itself if I look long enough. There’s no punctuation. No grammar. Not even a goodbye. Just the end of a thought. And I wonder if this is really how endings between friends are supposed to happen—so abrupt, so unfinished, so confusing.

I tried for months to understand what led to this finale. I built stories in my head, stacked possibilities on top of each other until they collapsed under their own weight. None of them explained why he stopped talking. None of them chose me back. There was nothing solid to hold onto, nothing sharp enough to cut through the not-knowing.

It feels like waking up to find the house rearranged while I slept. The walls are still there, the furniture still mine, but nothing is where I remember it being. 

The messages once flowed effortlessly. Late-night texts. He used to speak just to fill the space between moments. Now the silence does that instead.

It carries weight.
The weight of nothing.
The weight of everything.

Some losses don’t announce themselves. They don’t demand witnesses or explanations. They just stop answering. And sometimes endings don’t follow logic—they simply leave, taking their reasons with them. And now I had to as well.