life as poems 'n letters

There was once a girl who kept a chair open at her table.
A seat that stayed untouched, season after season,
through evenings and early morning sunrises.

She didn’t call it waiting—not out loud.
For almost a year, she kept a candle burning in the window.
silently wishing that whatever it was she was clinging to—
A voice, an emotion, an unspeakable presence—
Perhaps the light will guide it back.

She waited in subtle ways—not on benches or beside phones, but in the quiet pauses of her day.
In the second cup of coffee she brewed just in case.
In the way she left her evenings open, just in case.
In the softness of her voice, when she didn’t want to ask too much… just in case.

She wasn’t naive.
She knew the truth under her breath—that some echoes don’t return,
no matter how gently you listen for them.
But hope has a strange way of stretching itself thin.
Like a thread you can’t quite cut, because what if?

What if this time was different?
What if the space she left open was finally seen?
What if what she gave was finally enough?

There were beautiful moments, of course.
Moments that made her believe—if only for a heartbeat—that something real existed in the in-between.

The warmth of a message that came when she needed it most.
The way the silence broke with softness now and then.
A flicker of something deeper, raw, almost tender.

And she loved that version of it.
The version that felt safe. Present. Whole.
The version that gave more than it took.
The version that made the world feel like it could pause for her, too.

But it never stayed.
And love, she learned, cannot survive in scattered shadows and half-light.

So one morning, without ceremony,
she got up,
and she simply… stopped waiting.

She didn’t slam the door.
She didn’t write a goodbye letter.
She didn’t curse the quiet.
She just turned the flame off,
emptied the extra cup,
and filled the room with her own breath again.

She started answering her own questions.
Planning her days like she belonged fully to them.
She drank her coffee while it was hot.
She filled her silence with her own voice.
She made space—not for someone new, but for the version of herself she’d abandoned while hoping a ghost would become solid again.

And the strangest thing happened:

She missed it… less.
Not all at once.
But in slow, beautiful layers.

She began to realize she hadn’t really been waiting for someone.
She was waiting for herself to stop disappearing.

And now?

She was learning how to choose herself.
Every day.
Without apology. Without pause.
Without needing to explain the empty chair at her table.

Some nights, she still looks at that chair.
Not in pain. Not in longing.
Just… in memory.

A soft chapter. A half-finished song.
A story that taught her how deeply she could feel,
and how powerfully she could return to herself.