For Archival Purposes Only

On paper-cut pain, soft closeness, and remembering without burning

Perhaps it’s the breakup—this quiet unraveling—that’s led me to crave distraction.
Not devastation, not grief. I’m doing well, truly. There is no flood of emotion, no bitterness, no bewilderment. Just a soft, persistent ache. The kind that hums beneath the surface—almost imperceptible—until, suddenly, it isn’t.

At first, I didn’t notice it. I moved through my life as if nothing had happened.

Anger—dense and useful—clouded everything. It dulled the edges, hid the small cut underneath.

But eventually, the ache arrived. Quiet. Undeniable.
That same intimate, inconvenient kind of ache.
I remember telling my best friend that it was disturbing me—that I wished it would just go away.
She said something I’ve kept with me since: “It’s better to feel something now than nothing at all. Because that means what you felt before—love, or whatever shape it took—was real.”

Yes, that. That’s where I find myself now.

In Turkish, there’s a word for this: sızlamak. It defies direct translation in meaning, but imagine this—like the sting of a paper cut. Faint. Forgettable. Until you brush against it, and it reminds you of its presence. The pain isn’t dramatic, but it’s intimate. Inconvenient. And, of course—like everything else—it, too, heals.

I think that’s why the pain feels like a paper cut—sharp only in passing, not devastating. Because, truthfully, there was no grand, all-consuming fiction between us. No cinematic sweep of emotion I couldn't explain. What I felt was gentler than that. The good feeling was comfortable. The love was lingering. It built itself quietly, almost domestically. And so, too, has it faded: in soft increments, not in flames.

Maybe it was still a little naïve, though—not the kind of naivety that denies what’s wrong, but the kind that sees it clearly and stays anyway. I was well aware of the bad parts. They didn’t make me cry before sleep, they just made me go quiet—gaze off, absorb, accept. And the good? It never made me leap with joy, but it made me relax. It was the kind of feeling where you sit back into your chair and let your body soften. Where you look across the room and smile, not because something happened, but because nothing had to.

But let me return to what I meant to say.
To spare that delicate bruise from attention, I’ve been turning toward the things I love with unusual intensity—layering them into my days with a deliberate kind of urgency.

It’s important to note: this isn’t an attempt at avoidance. It’s quite the opposite. I’m not numbing myself—I’m provoking the wound, letting my rational and calmed thinking brush against it gently. I want to feel it, but on my own terms.

Ordinarily, I’m careful with pleasure. If I go to the opera one week, I wait before I visit the cinema. I pace myself: one experience at a time. A museum or a film. An evening with friends or the theatre. I’ve always believed in lingering. In giving each moment its due. In letting it breathe.

But this week, something shifted.
I’ve been rushing from one thing to the next—and oddly, I feel lighter.
There’s a strange sense of relief coursing through me, even in the hurry. And I think I know why. For months, I’d placed myself second. I wasn’t asking what I wanted, or what nourished me. My thoughts had begun to orbit around someone else as much as they did around me.

And at the time, I welcomed it. I thought that’s what intimacy meant—being all in, no distance.
But maybe that was our misstep:
We never let the space between us breathe.

Kahlil Gibran writes about this very matter:

“Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone.”
And he continues:
“Stand together yet not too near together,
for the pillars of the temple stand apart.”

Earlier today, I went to see Hiroshima Mon Amour at the cinema.
The film itself is a meditation on memory, on the impossibility of truly sharing the weight of our pasts. Two lovers—one French, one Japanese—entangle briefly in Hiroshima, bound not by future but by fragments of trauma. Their connection is intense, but suspended, suspended by the very histories that shaped them. They speak, but never truly touch. They remember, but never remember the same thing.

After the film, I spoke with a woman seated next to me. There was something luminous about her—a softness that belongs to people who’ve lived many lives within one. She told me she had seen the film a few years after when it first came out (1959), decades ago. And now, she was watching it again—with her family.

We talked about the ending. I told her I never believed the characters were really together. That they were simply echoes in each other’s memory, not companions in any real sense.
She smiled, then leaned into the man beside her—her husband, I came to understand—and said,

“But I married my own Hiroshima.”

I haven’t stopped thinking about that.

Because maybe that’s what intimacy can be: not the erasure of solitude, not the merging of two into one, but the choosing—deliberately, consciously—to stand beside someone, knowing the ache they carry may always remain slightly out of reach.

And maybe that’s where I went wrong.

Not in loving, but in trying too hard to close the gap. In rushing to dissolve distance, I forgot that solitude isn’t a flaw to be fixed, but a necessary part of being. That being close to someone should never mean being far from yourself.

But now, I’m returning. Slowly.
To myself, to ritual, to presence. I’ve begun rebuilding the architecture of my inner world—day by day, pleasure by pleasure. A museum visit. A late opera. A walk without destination. All of it mine, and no longer something to be shared with someone who couldn’t see it. I am no longer filling a silence—I am listening to it.

And in that, there is a different kind of intimacy: one with the self. One that prepares you not to lose yourself when love arrives again, but to stand beside it, fully intact.

*Don’t worry—this isn’t overthinking. This is creative nonfiction. (Any resemblance to real persons is purely autobiographical.)