Unwritten Endings

I remember the first time we met. It was one of those quiet, rainy afternoons where the world felt muted, softened by the gray clouds hanging low. I was hiding out in the corner of a little café, the kind that no one really notices unless they’re looking for refuge. You walked in, shaking off the rain, and I thought you were a figment of my imagination—a person who could only exist in stories. You were the kind of person who made everything around them seem more alive.

Your smile caught me off guard, and so did your voice when you said, “Is this seat taken?” I could’ve sworn I heard music when you spoke.

We didn’t need much. Small talk, glances, and shy laughs. But we talked about everything, and for the first time in a long while, it felt like we were writing something together—something unspoken, something that only the two of us could understand. We didn’t realize it then, but that day would be the first chapter of something beautiful.

We spent weeks getting lost in each other. I learned about your childhood, the places you had been, the places you wanted to go. You listened to my ramblings about dreams I was too afraid to chase. You were always there to reassure me, to push me a little further than I thought I could go. We spent hours in the quiet moments, the ones that seemed insignificant at the time, but I later realized those were the moments that made us.

We were building something.

But like all stories, there was a twist. The story wasn’t just about us. There was another part of the plot, something we didn’t realize we couldn’t escape. Life—real life, with all its messy truths and unpredictable turns—began to pull us in different directions.

I had to move away for a job. You had your own set of dreams and goals that needed your full attention. We tried to keep the connection alive, holding on to what we had like fragile paper. But distance makes things fragile in ways we never expect. The calls became fewer. The messages shorter. The silence stretched longer between the words.

One day, you told me, “I think we’re getting lost in the in-betweens.”

I could hear the sadness in your voice, but I didn’t want to admit that we were reaching the end of something we didn’t get to finish. It wasn’t that we didn’t care; it was that we both knew, deep down, that the ending we wanted wasn’t going to come the way we imagined. We were stuck in an unwritten chapter, a part of the story that couldn’t be predicted or forced.

“I don’t want to say goodbye,” you whispered one night, your voice breaking through the static on the phone. I could hear your heart in that sentence, and it mirrored mine. I didn’t want to say goodbye either, but neither of us knew how to say “see you later” without the heavy weight of finality hanging in the air.

We drifted apart, slowly, like two rivers that started from the same place but wound up going in different directions. There were no arguments. No fights. Just a quiet fading away.

Months passed. The world kept turning, the seasons changed, and I tried to pick up the pieces of my life without you. I went through the motions, but there was always an ache in the back of my chest, a void where something important used to be. I tried to fill it with work, with people, with distractions, but nothing seemed to fit right. Every step forward felt like a reminder that something precious had been lost—unfinished.

And then one evening, you texted me.

"I miss you."

It had been so long since we last spoke. So long since the last time your voice brushed against my soul. The message was simple, but it sent a thousand emotions flooding back all at once. I sat there, staring at the screen for what felt like an eternity. My fingers hovered over the keyboard, unsure of what to say.

Finally, I typed back, “I miss you too. But we were never meant to finish.”

I stared at those words before pressing send. I don’t know why I said that, why I let those words escape when deep down, I wasn’t sure if I meant them. Maybe I was trying to convince myself that it was okay, that it was enough to remember the good parts, to hold onto the beauty of what we shared without needing it to have a tidy conclusion.

Years passed. I moved to a new city, took on new challenges, met new people. I healed in some ways, but I still carried the memory of you with me, tucked away like a favorite book that you never quite want to finish, knowing that once it’s over, it’s over.

Then one afternoon, I found myself back in that café. The same one where we met, the one that still smelled faintly of coffee and rain. The world outside was draped in gray again, and I sat down at the same table we had shared, trying to pull myself back to that moment when things were simpler.

And there you were. Not in front of me, but in the quiet of the café, in the spaces between the people who came and went. You were still there, in the echoes of our conversations, in the laughter we shared, in the warmth that once filled the room. I realized, for the first time, that maybe we didn’t need a finished ending. Maybe the story we had was enough, even if it was unwritten.

We had something beautiful, even if it was fleeting. Maybe we were never meant to finish what we started. Maybe the story was always meant to remain unfinished, a chapter that only the two of us would ever understand. And as I sat there, alone but not lonely, I finally accepted it.

Some stories don’t need a conclusion. Some love stories live on in the spaces between the words, in the moments when you least expect them. Maybe that’s all we ever needed: a love that didn’t need to be finished to be beautiful.