I see you - Chavdar (@chavdar) • Collective

I wanted you to make me feel safe when I didn’t yet know how to create safety inside myself. I wanted your love to answer questions it could never answer: Am I enough? Am I desirable? Will you choose me? Will you stay? And somewhere along the way, I stopped asking whether I was choosing myself. The world keeps moving with an almost offensive normality. People go swimming. Trains arrive. cats demand food. Friends send messages. Plants grow new leaves. Summer comes back. I laugh sometimes. And every time I laugh, I discover that my life continued without asking your permission.

musti.dab

There are still things I want to tell you. Small things, mostly. A plant I finally learned the name of. Something stupid one of my cats did. A sentence I heard on the street that would have made you laugh. A tree somewhere in Berlin carrying fruit, the kind we would have stopped to inspect as if discovering it ourselves. Sometimes something happens and my first thought is still: I have to tell you this. And for one tiny second, you still exist exactly where you used to. Then I remember. There is nowhere to send it anymore.