Letting go wasn't the hardest part.
It was the after.
The moments when Akutu instinctively reached for her phone to text Nathan—only to remember that things weren't the same anymore.
The days when she caught herself looking for him in the crowd, even though she knew she shouldn't.
The silence where laughter used to be.
Breakups weren't always about pain.
Sometimes, they were about adjustment.
And Akutu was still learning how to adjust.
The first few weeks felt like walking through fog.
Nathan wasn't gone—he was still around, still in class, still sharing space in the same world she existed in.
But he was no longer hers.
And that was a different kind of absence.
They had agreed to let life pull them where they needed to go.
But what if she wasn't sure where that was?
Nathan wasn't struggling any less.
He had been the one to nod in agreement. The one to say, Yeah, we do. The one who knew, deep down, that this was right.
But even knowing that didn't make the adjustment easier.
He had gotten used to Akutu.
Her presence. Her laughter. The way she overexplained things when she got excited. The way she always had a theory about everything.
The habit of her.
And breaking that habit felt like learning to walk with a slight limp.
Not impossible. Just… different.
Healing wasn't linear.
Some days, Akutu felt fine—as if everything had unfolded exactly as it was meant to.
Other days, she found herself holding back tears over the smallest things.
A familiar joke. A song on the radio. A text notification that wasn't from him.
And then, there were the empty spaces.
The weekend afternoons that used to be filled with unplanned meetups.
The study sessions that stretched late into the night.
The quiet, easy companionship that had once been second nature.
Now, she had to redefine herself outside of all of that.
She had to learn who she was when she wasn't someone's almost something.
Nathan coped in his own way.
He buried himself in work, in projects, in plans for the future.
But no amount of distractions could fully erase the moments where he felt her absence.
He wondered if Akutu was feeling the same way.
If she was also caught between relief and sadness, between moving forward and looking back.
And most of all…
If she missed him, too.
One afternoon, they crossed paths near the library.
No planning. No expectations. Just a coincidence.
For a moment, neither of them knew what to say.
Then Akutu smiled—small, but real. "Hey."
Nathan exhaled, a weight he hadn't realized he was carrying lifting just a little.
"Hey."
And just like that, the world didn't feel so heavy anymore.
Because healing wasn't about forgetting.
It was about learning how to exist in the same space without breaking.
The pulleys of life had shifted once again.