No One’s Coming

Three in the morning and I’m sitting alone feeling like a ghost, replaying every mistake I ever made. Leaving her. Not going to college. The resolutions that made it until lunch. Deep in some old photos of a life that doesn’t exist anymore, and it felt like the ending of everything.

What happens is you disappear into yourself. The outside world becomes a rumor. The only answer I could find was that one person. That specific person who’d make it matter, who’d pull me out. I didn’t think about it—it just happened. I gave them everything: loyalty, desire, this concentrated attention they never asked for. They had no idea how much of me they were carrying. Some of them figured it out. Most didn’t.

Then the small things start adding up. Slower texts. Someone else in a photo. They’re tired, or they’re living their own life, or they just don’t feel the same way. The whole structure collapses. The love turns to hate. The hope becomes this suffocating weight. They’ve broken a promise they never made.

You can’t build yourself on top of one person. It’s not that they don’t want to. It’s that they can’t hold that much of you. No one can. The moment they prove they can’t, you feel more abandoned than before.

What actually helped was having a few people who actually knew me. Not fantasies or ideals, but real people who’d shown up before and would show up again. The ones I could call at three in the morning. They wouldn’t fix anything, but they were there. That mattered more than I thought it would. I started believing them when they said it passes, even when I didn’t believe anything else.

But they couldn’t do the real work. At some point I was alone with myself and I had to decide not to drown. I had to stop waiting for someone to pull me out and grab my own hand. It’s not inspirational. It’s not even brave. It’s just what happens when you run out of options.