Goodbyes.

"It's funny," she decided as she shoved her phone under her pillow and closed her eyes.

She waited for the tears to come, but somehow, they never came. She wondered if it was because she was too used to the hurt, the pain of separation, the familiarity of all these goodbyes. Or, maybe she was just too tired. She liked to think it was none of those. She wanted to believe that she was not at all affected by the latest pitfall in her already-fucked-up life. After all that she had been through, she decided that denial was a natural progression. It was better than anger and tears.

"I'm grateful that you were a part of my life," he had written in the text.

That was what she found funny. She had known him for over half a year, but she had never felt like he was grateful for anything. More so, she had never felt appreciated, validated. Being his friend was hard to her, it was like banging her head against a wall and feeling pain but not stopping anyway because for some inexplicable reason, she couldn't. It was after a huge fight (which, although she thought really hard, she couldn't remember what it was about) that she realised she loved him. She wasn't in love with him. She didn't want to hold his hand and lie on a grass and watch the stars with him, but she wanted to be there for him, all the time. She wanted to protect him, like an older sister protects her little brother. At that time, that was how she chose to see him. A little brother. But she discounted that sisters and brothers, they were family. And family was so much more of a complicated structure than friends. There was that idea that family would always be together, but here they were, saying their last goodbyes to each other.

She knew she was being melodramatic by choosing to cut all ties. It was in her nature. She attributed this to too much television and movies, too many books and sappy lyrics. Now, she realised it might just be the way she was. She didn't believe in halves, in regressions. She didn't think that someone could be amazing friends the way they were and then go back to being normal acquaintances without feeling like there was something missing, that there was something irretrievably lost.

"I will regret this," she said to no one in particular, staring at the fading glow-in-the-dark stickers on her ceiling.

She always did. She cared too much. Even though she was the one who initiated the goodbye, the one who wanted to move on by cutting him out, she was painfully aware that she was doing this not for herself but for him. For him to get his closure and live his life, while she stayed behind, stagnant, and continued to make pitiful attempts at bandaging the gaping wound she carried around.

She reached under her pillow and pulled out her phone. The screen lit up and dazzled her for a moment. She was sure now that one day, she was going to go blind from using her phone in the dark. Either that, or excessive crying. She wasn't sure, but she wouldn't be surprised if people did go blind from sadness. She opened up his text again and re-read it. The dull ache in her heart didn't subside, but it didn't intensify either, which she took as a good sign. She slowly, carefully, typed out a reply. 7 letters, one simple word: Goodbye. Her finger hovered over the "Send" button, and for a brief moment, she felt a familiar prickling in her eyes. Then, she switched off her phone and chucked it on the table.

The funny thing, she realised, wasn't what he had said. It was what he hadn't. He hadn't said goodbye, and she wouldn't either. Not all endings had to have goodbyes.