Three days. It had been three days since I last saw him, and yet the memory clung to me like fog—soft, lingering, refusing to lift. I hadn't meant to count. But my body did it for me, tracking time not with numbers but with the strange ache in my chest each morning. I would wake earlier than usual, eyes opening before the alarm, mind drifting into a silence that wasn't empty but full—too full—of things unsaid.
I had cleaned the apartment twice already. Not because it needed cleaning, but because I needed to feel like I was doing something. Something other than thinking. I rearranged the bookshelves, alphabetized the spices, even watered the succulents that didn't need water. Anything to keep my hands moving while my heart stood still. But none of it worked.
He kept appearing—in corners of my memory, in shadows of the street, in the rustle of an old playlist I accidentally clicked on. And every time, it was like bumping into a former version of myself. One who hadn't yet learned how silence could wound more than words.
I tried to write. Of course I did. Writing had always been the place I went to when the world felt too sharp. But for the first time in a long while, I couldn't find the words. Not because I had nothing to say, but because everything I wanted to say was tangled in him.
I opened my laptop and stared at the blank document. The cursor blinked, steady and patient, like it was waiting for me to remember how to be brave. I wrote a single line.
"He didn't ask why she left. Just said, 'You look tired.' And somehow, that was enough."
I stared at the sentence for a long time. Then I deleted it. Then I typed it again. Then I left it there. Something about it felt too honest to erase.
I wasn't writing about him. Not directly. The characters were different, their names changed, their stories dressed in fiction. But the truth was there, underneath the layers of metaphor and metaphorical distance. A woman returning to a city she no longer belonged to. A man who had learned how to disappear. They circled each other, uncertain, tentative. Because that's what happens when two people remember each other differently.
I shut the laptop and walked to the window. Hanoi looked just as it always had from the tenth floor—busy, gray, familiar. But I felt like I was watching it from behind glass, like a museum display of a life I used to live.
My phone buzzed.
It was from Linh, my editor. "Deadline's next week. You okay?"
I stared at the message for a moment before typing, "I'm working on it."
A lie. Or maybe a half-truth. I was working. Just not on the story she expected.
I pulled out an old notebook from the drawer, the kind I used to carry everywhere back in university. Its pages were yellowed, the spine cracked from too much being opened and closed. It still smelled like the library at dusk and cheap ink. I flipped to a fresh page and let the pen move without thinking.
"She hadn't seen him in years. But when she did, it wasn't anger or sadness that arrived. It was silence. Deep, reverent, aching silence."
The pen didn't stop after that.
I wrote through lunch, through the early afternoon rain, through the golden wash of late sunlight that spilled across the table. Words poured out of me, messy and sharp and beautiful in their brokenness. For the first time in a long while, I didn't edit. I just wrote. Let the feelings fall where they may.
There's something both terrifying and freeing about writing the truth, even when it's cloaked in fiction. You begin to see yourself not as the victim of a story but as its witness. You stop asking why things happened the way they did, and instead start asking, "What did I learn from it?"
Later that evening, I took a long walk through the city. The streets were lit with warm lanterns and soft neon, casting long shadows that felt almost like memories moving beside me. I passed the little bookshop where we used to sit in silence and read next to each other. I remembered the way Khánh would tilt his head when he was thinking, the way his thumb would trace the edge of the page like he was savoring the words.
I paused at the corner café—the one with mismatched chairs and tiny lights strung across the ceiling. I remembered the time he brought me there for no reason at all, just because he thought the croissants looked like something out of a French movie. I remembered how we laughed when the coffee was terrible but the day still felt perfect.
It wasn't the big moments I missed.
It was the tiny, quiet ones. The ones you don't even realize are memories until they come back, uninvited and vivid.
I bought a small poetry book from a sidewalk vendor. "Letters to a Quiet Heart," it said. I flipped it open at random.
"Some things end not because they should, but because we didn't know how to hold them gently enough."
That line stayed with me.
That night, I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling fan, letting the line echo in my head. I had been so careful to build a life that didn't need him. And yet here I was—writing him into every paragraph, remembering him in every corner of the city.
I didn't know if he remembered me the same way. I didn't even know if he thought of me at all. But that wasn't the point anymore.
The point was, I was feeling again. And sometimes, feeling is enough.
The next day, I wrote again. Really wrote.
The words came slowly at first, hesitant, like they weren't sure they were welcome. But then they came freely—pages and pages of a new story. A woman learning how to forgive without forgetting. A man learning how to return without asking to be let in. A city that held both of them like a secret.