Leaving, to most people, is just a moment a goodbye, a suitcase packed, a chapter closed with the promise of another. But to me, leaving means something much heavier. It’s not just a step away it’s everything falling apart all at once. It’s silence where there used to be laughter, it’s empty rooms where love used to live. Leaving has never been a choice for me. It’s been a wound that never really heals. A punishment I never quite earned.

When I think about what leaving means, I think about my son. My heart breaks in places words can’t reach because I don’t get to see him the way I should the way a mother is supposed to. His little hands, his laughter, his voice when he calls out I miss everything. Time slips by, and all I can do is watch it go. He’s growing, changing, learning new things, and I’m missing it. I carry that pain like a stone in my chest every single day. I would give anything to go back, to rewrite the story, to hold him and never let go.

People talk about love like it’s permanent, but my life has taught me that people leave even the ones who say they won’t. I’ve been abandoned more times than I can count. By family who was supposed to be my foundation, by friends who promised to stand by me. They left when things got messy, when I wasn’t easy to love, when I needed them the most. They didn’t see the battles I was fighting. Or maybe they did and turned their backs anyway.

There’s a kind of loneliness that sets in when you realize no one’s coming. When you’re sitting in your pain and the room is silent. When you reach out and no one reaches back. That’s what leaving means to me. Not just the act of walking away, but being the one left behind, again and again, trying to find meaning in the emptiness. It’s learning how to survive with a heart that’s constantly breaking. It’s pretending to be okay when nothing really is.

People say time heals. But time also forgets. And I wonder, how long until the memory of me fades from their minds the way I fear I’m already fading from my son’s? How long until I’m just someone they used to know?

I try to stay strong. I try to find light in places that feel hopeless. But the truth is, some nights I break. Some nights I cry for the love I never got, for the warmth I still crave, for the child I can’t hold, for the people who left without even looking back.

Leaving, to me, is more than goodbye. It’s the pain of being left, the ache of missing someone who’s still breathing but out of reach, the emptiness that fills your soul when you’ve been forgotten. It’s losing everything and still waking up every day, somehow.

I don’t know what comes next. But I do know this: I carry my love, even in absence. I carry my son in my heart, always. And even if everyone else walks away, I won’t walk out on myself not again.

Because even in the dark, I’m still here. I’m still standing. I’m still fighting to be seen, to be loved, to come back from everything that tried to break me.