I stopped reading old messages when I felt lonely at night

Dear Delyara, That habit was hurting me. Not dramatically. Quietly. Repeatedly. Every time the house went still and loneliness got louder, I would reach backward. Old conversations, old tenderness, old proof that once I had been wanted in a way that felt immediate and certain. I told myself I was remembering. Really, I was reopening. It never left me soothed. Only rawer. So I deleted them. Not in anger. In recognition. Because some forms of comfort stop being comfort and become self-harm wearing nostalgia’s face. I needed to admit that. Deleting them did not make me healed. It did remove one way I kept wounding myself in private while calling it tenderness. That’s not nothing.