From "tell me everything".

From "tell me everything" to "I forgot to reply."

This type of heartbreak doesn’t come with shouting.. It doesn’t come with doors slammed or messages left on read with burning tension. It comes in teaspoons. In the slow evaporation of habits. In the way someone who used to call you their home starts replying with just "lol."

This is for the friendships that ended not with war, but with forgetfulness. For the soul ties that simply unthreaded themselves, gently, like a loose hem unraveling in silence of the graveyard on a midnight.

You don’t remember the exact last conversation. You just know you stopped checking in. They stopped checking back. And the familiar voice that used to ring in your head is now just a ghost that sometimes walks past on your feed. And somehow, you grieve, but no one lets you say it out loud.

Because what is there to mourn when no one died?

The truth? This kind of grief is its own apocalypse.

Sometimes, I push back the tears at how many versions of me are buried in the inboxes of people who once swore I was irreplaceable. How many good mornings went unreciprocated until we both stopped trying. I don’t blame them. How many calls I ignored because I was scared to burden them with my baggages amd how many accusations of “you palled away first” . And I try not to blame myself either. But I do sit with the heartache. The one that sounds like, "I wish we had just said something. I wish I had cleared my throat, cleaned my eyes and picked the call, I wish I had begged for forgiveness the umpteenth time."

We don’t talk enough about this kind of silence. How two people who once knew each other’s dreams can become strangers in the same room. How comfort doesn’t always fight for itself.

I think back to all the times I made room for people who were once everything, only to realize that life doesn’t always give us the dignity of clean endings, obviously: it’s not Bollywood. It just shifts us, slowly but surely, into different stories.

This is just growing up. It’s just life. It’s just what happens when people stop seeing each other as safe places. But I still miss the versions of us that existed in that old bubble. The ones that said, with so much ease, "tell me everything." The ones one that shared friends and foes, until they become the line in the middle.

So here’s to the ones we lost to time. The ones we still remember in fragments. The ones we don’t text anymore but still wish well in passing thoughts.

Here’s to us.

Even if we forgot to reply.