I'll Be Watching You

It started with a question—casual, almost meaningless on the surface. A friend laughed and asked, “Where did you even pick that up?” I’d said some random phrase, one of those quirky expressions that doesn’t even feel like it belongs to you anymore. Without thinking, I almost said their name. I stopped myself, but the thought stayed with me.

It’s strange how people stay with you, long after they’re gone. Not in the big, obvious ways—not in saved photos or birthdays that still pop up on your calendar—but in the small, almost invisible ones. In the sayings you’ve adopted that no one else would recognize. In the way you order your coffee because they swore it was the only “right” way. In the songs you can’t listen to, not because they hurt, but because they feel like stepping into a version of yourself you’ve left behind.

Losing someone who’s still alive is its own kind of grief. There’s no funeral, no final goodbye, no traditions to mark the absence. Instead, it’s the quiet realization that they’ve slipped out of your life in a way that feels both sudden and inevitable. They’re still out there, existing in a world you can only see in fragments—an Instagram post, a mention in passing, a memory that comes out of nowhere and pulls the air from your lungs.

You tell yourself you’ve moved on. And maybe you have, mostly. You laugh at the jokes, make new plans, fill the silence with noise. But sometimes, it catches you off guard. You’ll hear a song you both loved and find yourself frozen in the middle of whatever you were doing. Or someone will bring up a movie you saw together, and for a second, it’s like they’re right there with you, before the moment vanishes, leaving an ache in its place.

There’s no closure, no clean ending. It’s like finishing a story only to realize the last chapter was ripped out. You don’t want them back, not really. You know life doesn’t rewind like a cassette tape, and you wouldn’t even know how to go back to who you were together. But there’s still something tender about the thought of them—like an old favorite sweater that doesn’t fit anymore but still feels too important to throw away.

Sometimes, you catch glimpses of their life now. Maybe it’s a tagged photo of them at a party, smiling the way they used to. Or a mutual friend mentions their name, and suddenly you’re flooded with questions you’ll never ask. Are they happy? Do they think about you? What parts of their life still carry your fingerprints?

It’s not longing—not exactly. You’re not waiting for them to come back, and you don’t wish things had turned out differently, at least not most of the time. But there’s a strange sweetness in knowing they’re out there, living and growing, even if it’s without you. It’s like watching an old favorite actor in a new role you weren’t cast in. You don’t get to be part of the story anymore, but you’re still rooting for them.

And yes, it hurts sometimes. It hurts to know they’re laughing at jokes you’ll never hear, calling someone else when they’re excited or when everything feels like it’s falling apart. It hurts to see their life move forward when yours feels stuck in the space they left behind. But even that pain feels like proof of what you had—proof that it mattered enough to leave a mark.

So, you carry them with you. Not in dramatic ways, but in the smallest things. In the way you fold your shirts because they taught you the “right” way. In the places you avoid because they feel like stepping into the past. In the way your mind drifts when someone says something they would’ve found hilarious, and you smile quietly, knowing they would’ve loved it.

I guess they’ll never know. And that’s okay. You don’t need them to. But you hope, somehow, they feel it—that somewhere in the universe, someone is silently cheering for them, hoping the world is kind to them. Because love doesn’t disappear when someone leaves. It just changes shape. It moves into quieter places, soft and unspoken but still there.

And even if you never speak to them again, you'll be watching them. Not because you’re stuck, but because some people are part of you forever. You watch them from the edges of their new life, not with bitterness, but with a quiet kind of pride. Because even though you don’t know who they are now, you’ll always care for who they were—and for the parts of you that they helped shape.

Some connections don’t fade. They stay, not as sharp as they once were, but as something gentler. A soft echo. A warm memory. And you carry it forward, because even if the story ended, it was worth being written in the first place.