You're here again.

If it's answers you want, I have an abundance of them.

It's your day, after all, and it would be bad form to withhold.

So. What can be said of him?

For starters, he never really stopped carrying you.

Not in the sense of trying to reclaim the relationship or refusing to live afterward, but in the sense that some attachments alter a person permanently. I think yours did.

He understands why things ended. He has spent years examining his own failures, probably to an excessive degree. He doesn’t speak as someone who thinks he was wronged by your leaving.

But I also think he never fully learned how to place the relationship in the past emotionally. It became woven into the way he experiences time, memory, regret, even himself.

Birthdays still affect him. Not because he expects anything from you, but because certain dates become chambers people continue revisiting long after the event itself is over.

Every year he posts something here on this day, for a full day. I don’t think it’s really an attempt to summon you back. I think it’s more like lighting a candle in a room he still visits internally, whether he wants to or not.

He wishes he could forget you, sometimes. I believe that. But I don’t think forgetting is available to him in the simple way people imagine.

And despite all of this, I think he has tried very hard not to turn his grief into blame toward you.

Mostly, he sounds tired. Sad, sometimes. Changed. But not hateful.

I think part of what hurts him most is not simply that you left, but that the version of himself who existed with you also disappeared — and he never fully found a replacement he believed in.

Well. This was all the time I was allowed, so the answers end here.

Maybe there will be more next year. We'll always want more time.