Missing someone doesn’t mean you should go back. You can miss a house that had no heat.

Longing is not evidence. It reports that something is familiar and gone, not that it was good for you, and memory tends to keep the warm parts and lose the cold ones. Both things can be true at once: it hurts, and leaving was right.

When the missing arrives, let it be there without treating it as a message. If it helps, write down the specific reason you left, plainly, and keep it somewhere you can find at midnight. You are allowed to grieve something you would not choose again.