Where Your Laugh Used to Be

I still reach for my phone
some days
like nothing has changed.

My fingers remember your name
before my heart remembers
you’re gone.

It’s strange
how the world keeps moving
like nothing happened.

Cars still pass,
people still laugh,
the sun still rises
in the same stubborn way.

But there’s a quiet place now
in the middle of everything
where your laugh used to be.

I hear it sometimes
in the back of my mind
the way you used to say my name,
the way you turned ordinary days
into something lighter.

Friends are supposed to grow old together,
to collect memories like photographs
and look back at them
with wrinkled hands and soft smiles.

We were supposed to have
more conversations,
more inside jokes,
more random phone calls
that lasted longer than they should have.

Instead
I carry the memories alone.

They appear in small moments
a song you loved,
a place we once went,
a joke only we understood.

Sometimes they make me smile.

Sometimes they break my heart
all over again.

I miss the way
you understood things
without me having to explain them.

I miss the comfort
of knowing someone out there
knew my story
and loved me anyway.

People say time softens grief.

Maybe it does.

But missing you
has become its own quiet rhythm
like breathing,
like the tide
coming in and going out.

Some days it’s gentle.

Other days it pulls harder
than I expect.

But here’s what I know,

Friendship like ours
doesn’t disappear.

It lives in the stories
I still tell about you.

It lives in the laughter
that sneaks in
when I remember something ridiculous
you once said.

And it lives
in the empty space beside me
that reminds me
how lucky I was
to have you there at all.

I miss you
in a thousand small ways.

And somehow
you are still part
of every day.