When No One Comes

I told myself it was just the world breathing in and out, but every gust of wind was your name sliding past my face, every shiver a reminder that absence has a taste. I left my window open all night. Not for the air, or even the stars, and sat on the edge of my bed, fingers pressed to the sill, listening for the brush of footsteps that never came. The room was quiet except for the hum of the radiator and the distant sirens curling through the empty streets. I imagined that if I could hold the night just so, if I could press myself into its angles and shadows, the one I was waiting for might slip through the darkness and find me.

There’s a strange kind of intimacy in waiting for someone who doesn’t arrive. You learn to measure time by the things that almost touch you: the rhythm of your own heartbeat, the whisper of curtains, the way a single candle flame trembles as if it knows. I traced the shapes of the room with my eyes - the chipped paint on the windowsill, the stack of books that always threatened to fall, the little dent in the floorboards beneath the bed - and thought that maybe staying present for all of it was how I could prove my patience, my worth. I kept counting the minutes, the hours, pretending that if I simply stayed open enough, somehow the one would find me, that the night would bend to my hope, that absence might be persuaded to deliver presence.

Hunger doesn’t always scream. Sometimes it hums beneath your ribs, steady and sly, curling around your lungs until even your breath tastes hollow. It isn’t just missing someone. It’s the corrosion of hope, quiet and persistent, until the very parts of you meant to hold warmth feel slick and empty. I could feel it in the way my fingers tingled from the cold, in the ache behind my eyes from staring too long into darkness. The night offered no answers, only the slow, persistent echo of what I wanted, unattainable and sharp.

I tried to be poetic about it, to romanticise my patience. I imagined that someone would see it, that longing could be proof of devotion, that the act of waiting was evidence of my own worth. But longing is a cruel artist. It paints you in shades of green and blue you don’t recognise at first - the envy of being left behind, the quiet outrage at a world that refuses to answer, the strange, dizzying ache of wanting something that will never arrive. It spreads into your skin and bones until you carry it as a weight you can no longer name, until your own reflection feels distant, unfamiliar.

I didn’t close the window. I couldn’t. To shut it would be to admit that some hands will never reach for mine, and that some voices will never call my name. So I stayed, letting the night come in, letting the air taste of absence, letting myself become a monument to desire that will never be returned. I imagined the stars pressed against the glass, like witnesses, like guardians of my vigil. I felt both ridiculous and sacred, suspended in the strange, silent cathedral of waiting.

And in the morning, when the sunlight slid across the floor and my neck ached from leaning too long, I realised that absence has its own gravity, pulling at every thought, every quiet hope I’d dared to harbour, and I had spent the night orbiting it alone, suspended between what I wanted and what would never come.