i miss you more than life

1.

She first met her at seventeen.

Not physically, of course.

Just in flashes.

In mirrors after midnight.
In the way her chest hurt while listening to Ghost years later without understanding why.
In daydreams that felt more like memories than imagination.

The girl had no name.

But she existed everywhere.

She was the version of herself who would have lived beautifully.

Not perfectly.
Just… fully.

The girl who laughed without self-consciousness.
Who danced in her room without checking if the curtains were closed.
Who fell in love honestly instead of intellectually dissecting every feeling until it bled to death.
Who walked through life softly instead of cautiously.

Sometimes she could almost see her.

In bookstore windows.
In reflections on train glass.
In dreams that dissolved too quickly after waking.

And every time, the feeling was the same:

*There you are.*
*The person I was supposed to become.*

But life kept happening before she could reach her.

Years passed quietly.

Responsibilities piled up.
People called her mature.
Independent.
Reliable.

Nobody noticed how exhausted she was from carrying a self that never fully fit her spirit.

At twenty-nine, she had become someone functional.

She woke up.
Worked.
Smiled at the right moments.
Answered messages.
Survived.

But late at night, another life leaked through the cracks.

Usually around 1 a.m.

Usually with headphones on.

Usually when the city outside her apartment became silent enough for yearning to speak.

That was when she thought about the girl again.

The unreal one.

The impossible self.

Sometimes she imagined meeting her in a different universe.

“You took too long,” the girl would say teasingly.

And she would laugh through tears because even in fantasy, the other version of her looked lighter. Warmer. Alive in ways she herself had never managed to be.

The worst part was this:

She didn’t even know if that version had ever truly existed.

Maybe she had invented her out of loneliness.
Out of unmet needs.
Out of all the tenderness life never gave her room to become.

But the longing remained anyway.

Because the heart is cruel like that.
It can grieve fictional things as if they once breathed.

One rainy night, after another endless hospital shift, she stood in front of her bathroom mirror with wet hair dripping onto the tiles.

Her eyes looked older than she remembered.

For a long time, she stared silently at her own reflection.

Then, softly —
so softly it almost disappeared into the sound of rain outside —

she whispered:

“I miss you.”

Not him.
Not anyone else.

The girl she never became.

And somehow, impossibly,
the silence that followed felt like being missed back.