Getting back with your ex is the only thing you fantasize about. You’re a level-headed guy, a realist, a normal one per se, all except when it comes to her. You see her name and your heart stops even though it’s been years since you were last with her. Years since she texted you in the middle of the night, 4:32 am to be exact, and even though you know she had been railing coke all night there must have been one true, genuine slice of her soul that had been dying to speak to you too. So you hold on, years after being ghosted, inevitable because you’re you and she’s Her—part woman, part deity you’ve given up your soul for as a meager but lifelong offering. You don’t even believe in God but something in you looked up and said “thank you” when her name shined bright across your phone screen one night, as if you hadn’t spent the last few years manifesting her return. As if you hadn’t spent the afternoon jerking off after lurking her social media.

It’s not healthy for you, really. Everything you’ve ever wanted staring you right back in the face, instantaneous after years of pining. The name you’ve trained your body to respond to with heart palpitations blaring in all of its blue lit unexpectedness feels almost like a violation. It takes you what seems like years to muster the courage to open the notification, lest it be the last time you see it happen in your lifetime. Why you? Why now? Questions that you let go unanswered despite your curiosity swelling, just like the rest of you, untouched since the last time she kissed you when you said your forever goodbyes. Had you died and gone to heaven?

It’s not enough for you—the inconsistent communication. The one-sidedness of it all. The way you carved out your personality to fit her life, her needs, her wants. The breakup was probably one of the best things to happen to you—a sense of autonomy you gained: a life outside of being only a puzzle piece to one woman’s success. A pawn to her power. Knowing this, and yet none of this kept you from texting her back—with a wait of a whole sixty seconds as not to seem ‘lame’—and with that, the games start all over again.

Or do they? As your excitement and fantasies for the future grow, her texts become less and less, with the spaces in between replies spanning hours, sometimes days. Once, after hours of pacing you decide to double text her, and she simply never replies to you again. You know she’s on her phone because she’s been posting to her story all day, and you try to soothe your ego by telling yourself she’s hot, of course she’s busy. But she had never been this busy when you were together, not til the very end. Those were the darkest days, the ones you don’t care to remember because all you did was sleep and hope you’d wake in another timeline, another universe in which you two would never not be forever. Here you are, back in the darkness, right where she left you, right where she likes you, and that’s reason enough never to leave.