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A Light-Year Between Us

Published on September 27, 2025, 7:10 PM

A Light-Year Between Us

We breathe the same air, yet exist in different galaxies.

I Can Hear You, But I Can’t Reach You

We sit at the same table. Your coffee cools beside mine. From the outside, we look close—elbows almost touching, breathing in sync. But inside, there's silence. Not the peaceful kind. The aching kind.

It’s been weeks since your eyes looked at me with warmth, months since your voice softened at the edges when saying my name. We talk—about groceries, bills, the cat scratching the couch again. But the words fall between us like snow, piling high until we’re buried beneath them.

I miss you. And you’re right here.

A Thousand Little Distances

Emotional distance doesn’t happen all at once. It stretches slowly, like a rubber band pulled across time. One forgotten goodnight kiss. A glance at your phone instead of my face. That one conversation you shut down too quickly. I noticed. I always do.

You say you’re tired. I say I’m fine.

Neither of us really is.

We start doing things in parallel—brushing teeth side by side, scrolling through phones in the same bed, living together but not with each other. It’s routine, not connection. We’ve become astronauts drifting in separate orbits, waving at each other through fogged-up visors.

Light-Years in a Living Room

The living room is quiet. You’re on the couch; I’m in the kitchen. Five steps away, and yet it feels like five hundred million miles. I want to cross it—to sit beside you, to say something real. But I hesitate. Why? Because I don't know if I’ll be heard. Not truly.

You used to read my silences like a map. Now they seem invisible to you.

And maybe I’ve stopped speaking in ways you understand.

This is what it feels like to have a light-year between two hearts. Not rage. Not betrayal. Just the slow fading of color. The stillness before the goodbye.

Almost Close, Almost Gone

I dream of what we used to be. Sunday mornings tangled in blankets and laughter. Long car rides where even silence felt full. That time you stayed up all night just to hear how my day went. Who were those people? Are they still somewhere inside us?

Maybe. But I can’t find them anymore.

You’re a familiar stranger now—your shape unchanged, your essence unreachable. We share space but not presence. Touch but not tenderness. Words but not meaning.

A part of me wants to shake you, scream, “Don’t you feel this distance too?”

But another part already knows: you do.

You just don’t know how to close it either.

When Distance Becomes the Only Constant

Some say the opposite of love is hate, but I think it’s this: indifference disguised as routine. A silent pact not to rock the boat, even if it’s already drifting out to sea.

We’ve become masters at pretending. At being fine. At smiling without feeling. We pass the salt like strangers. We sleep back to back, like bookends holding a story we no longer open.

And yet—some nights, I still hope.

I hope that someday, somehow, you’ll look at me the way you used to. That we’ll remember how to reach across this invisible chasm.

But tonight, I just sit quietly. I sip my coffee. I feel the cold creeping in.

You’re right here.

And we’re a light-year apart.

___

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