If you were here, I would picture you sitting under the gentle pouring of the sun, your silhouette outlined by the floor. 

I would hold onto your shadow a little longer, a little tighter, though I have always known that my hands can never grasp what only passes through them. Still, I stare at my helpless fingers grazing the air like they belong to someone else. 

Remember how we once laughed at the joke our friend made? "I will never fall in love like the both of you," he said. "Like an atom torn in half, you will detonate into tiny pieces." Somehow, it is only now that I started to feel the punch in his lines when my body is aching for the parts it no longer has.

In the end, we might have really exploded—haven't we?

The only remaining pieces are the remnants of what we were. These hands that once found yours. Your head once resting on my chest. My palms once pressed against your face. 

Your beating heart that my ears still hear, your eyes that still linger in my mind—your face that I still see. This broken heart, this stillness, this silence.

At some point I was meaning to ask, did I ever really hold you? Were you only ever near—never truly here?

If we were merely made up atoms that never touched, then how is it that the lightest and smallest of all carry the heavy weight of leaving? How do these tiny fragments of what we are hold so much grief, so much love?

I look for answers, and all I arrive at is this: all I am is but an assemblage of tiny atoms. And even now, I am still made up of these tiny pieces that tremble at the mere gravity of you.

I can no longer hold the questions—only this moment. The sun feels warm and my fingers are still. Shadows, I remind myself, do not have atoms. 

You weren't here. But I still feel your weight in the parts that are no longer there. 

And perhaps, in some inexplicable way, you were really never truly here to begin with.

- Kristine Aimee Millonte
(Layout by Phoemella Jane Balderrama/FEU Advocate)