I'm alone...

I'm alone, but not necessarily lonely.

Inside me, there is a silence that no longer screams, it simply breathes.

It’s a strange feeling… not bad, just new.

For twenty years, I always knew there was someone there.

A presence. A familiar voice with whom to share coffee and the day’s news, to discuss the weather or the chaos of the world. It was the certainty of not being alone, even when I felt lonely.

After the separation came the whirlwind.

A restlessness that wouldn’t fit inside me.

The urgency to fill the emptiness with another skin, another gaze, another desire.

I wanted to fall in love again, perhaps not with someone in particular, but with the idea of being loved, of being remembered, of still having a place in someone’s dreams.

Today, I look inward and find a different kind of calm.

I am not in love, and for the first time, that doesn’t weigh on me.

I feel no rush.

I know that, at this moment, there is no one thinking of me before falling asleep, and curiously, that no longer hurts.

I am no longer afraid of silence or of tomorrow.

It has become company, a shelter.

Sometimes it still frightens me, perhaps because I am still getting used to it... to this new way of existing with myself.

I wonder if this is what they call rebirth, or simply the beginning of a new version of me

calmer, more grounded, more my own.

Perhaps this is, after all, the new me.