Sometimes I think about Bellevue.

Not the version people sell to you, glass towers, polished sidewalks, tech money humming under the skin of the city. I think about the apartment. The dim kitchen light at 2 a.m. The way the wooden floors sounded under tired feet after another night shift at the hospital. The silence that waited for me when I opened the door.

I wasn’t really alone then. I had a roommate. I had a cat that threaded itself around my ankles like a living shadow. But I was alone in the way that matters sometimes. Alone enough to hear myself think.

She worked corporate days at Microsoft. I worked hospital night. We orbited each other like strangers renting the same apartment. Sometimes days passed where the only evidence she existed was a coffee mug in the sink or the faint smell of expensive shampoo drifting from the bathroom.

And somehow, in that quiet loneliness, I knew myself better.

I moved in with my boyfriend in January 2025. A year and a half ago now. Long enough for our lives to braid together in all the ordinary ways: shared groceries, shared laundry, shared exhaustion. Shared routines so familiar they stop feeling visible.

I love him. I do. That’s the difficult part to explain.

This isn’t some secret wish to be single. It isn’t me fantasizing about freedom in the reckless sense. I still want him. I still want our future. But there’s this small part of me that misses existing completely on my own terms. A part of me that remembers what it felt like to belong only to myself.

There was something romantic about it. Not glamorous, just sacred.

Coming home to an apartment that held only your own mess. Your own noise. Your own strange habits no one else has to witness or tolerate. Eating cereal for dinner without explanation. Hyper-fixating on some obscure hobby until sunrise. Leaving dishes in the sink because they’re your dishes. Buying groceries that only make sense to you.

Sometimes I think living alone let me become more myself, not less.

I’m difficult to live with in ways that don’t always show on the surface. I like things clean to the point it feels stitched into my nervous system. Not perfection exactly, just control. Order. Silence. If I come home and the apartment is chaotic, something inside me starts buzzing violently. I can feel irritation rise under my skin before I even take my shoes off. I clean like I’m trying to outrun something. Scrubbing counters with resentment clenched in my jaw. Organizing drawers at midnight because I can’t settle until the world feels quiet again.

And sometimes I wonder if he deserves softer than that.

Maybe he deserves a home where he can exist without accidentally triggering someone else’s invisible alarms.

People don’t talk enough about how intimacy can dull certain kinds of romance. Not because love disappears, but because proximity changes its shape. When you live together, you stop “arriving” to each other. Date nights become scheduled. Predictable. Less electric somehow. You miss the ache of anticipation. The ritual of getting ready to see someone you haven’t touched all week. The sweetness of missing them.

There’s something tragic about loving someone deeply and still craving solitude like oxygen.

Lately I’ve caught myself thinking about travel nursing. About temporary apartments in unfamiliar cities. About train stations and packed duffel bags and the anonymity of starting over every thirteen weeks. Maybe it’s practical, better money, more opportunities. Maybe it’s escapism dressed up as ambition.

Or maybe it’s just the fantasy of having permission to leave for a little while.

Not leave him. Just leave the version of myself that has become fused to another person.

I’ve Googled it before, “Is it normal to miss living alone when you’re in love?” Apparently it is. Apparently there are people who live separately and stay together. People who sleep in separate bedrooms. People who build relationships spacious enough to breathe inside.

Maybe love isn’t always measured by proximity.

I’ve mentioned pieces of this to my therapist before, how much I miss being alone with myself. How sometimes I feel more performative living with someone else, even someone safe. Like parts of me stay folded up and put away because another consciousness is always nearby. Another pair of eyes. Another rhythm to consider.

When my boyfriend starts paramedic school, we’ll probably get a version of this anyway. Nine months of opposite schedules and exhaustion and distance. We won’t see each other much. And I already know the ugly thoughts that will creep in during quiet hours, the fear of cheating, abandonment, replacement. Even though realistically, he’ll be too busy surviving to do anything else.

Love makes fools out of our imaginations sometimes.

Still, I wonder who I’ll become in those months.

Maybe I’ll remember how to sit alone in silence without feeling guilty for it. Maybe I’ll realize solitude was never the thing I missed most.

Maybe I just miss the girl in Bellevue, exhausted, strange, lonely, independent, standing in a tiny apartment kitchen at 3 a.m., realizing for the first time that her life belonged entirely to her.