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Strangers

  • Writer: Katherine Tatsuda
    Katherine Tatsuda
  • Oct 6
  • 1 min read

Sometimes, the hardest part is walking away from what once felt like home.
Sometimes, the hardest part is walking away from what once felt like home.

October 6, 2025


It’s such a strange, sad thing—

to be strangers with someone who once felt like home.


To have shared mornings and midnights,

to have known their laugh in the dark,

the curve of their breath when they slept,

the rhythm of their footsteps coming up the stairs.


To have built tiny rituals—

Slim Jims and ice cream in bed,

salads and roasted vegetables,

music documentaries—

that at the time felt eternal,

like threads of a life being woven together.


And now

to pass through days where their name rarely crosses my lips,

where silence has taken the place of all the small tendernesses,

where the person who once saw every side of me

walks past me like I don’t exist

and shows signs of life moving on.


It’s a heartbreak that doesn’t roar anymore.

It lingers quietly—like a shadow of a song

you can’t quite remember,

but your body still knows how to hum.


What’s left isn’t hatred or longing anymore.

It’s just the quiet disbelief

that two people once enveloped by infatuation and new love,

that grew into comfort and familiarity despite being tarnished,

can become less than nothing at all.


Strangers—

with a history that only we will ever know.


It all meant something to me.


Now I know I can love deeply, and I can survive heartbreak.

Katherine Tatsuda

Author | Poet | Human

Based in Ketchikan, Alaska

© 2025 Katherine Tatsuda | All Rights Reserved 

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