The Art Of Rebecca Bones

We were never going to end gently.
I think some part of me knew it from the beginning. The way your presence felt less like sunlight and more like a storm. Beautiful. Unavoidable. The kind of thing you don’t outrun…you just stand there and let it find you.
And I did.
I let you find me in quiet moments and unfinished thoughts. I let you settle into the spaces where something softer should have lived. I mistook your distance for mystery and your inconsistency for depth. As if loving you was meant to feel like deciphering something ancient and half-forgotten.
But love is not meant to feel like guessing.
Still, I stayed.
I stayed the first time you chose something else over me, telling myself it was nothing. I stayed when plans unraveled at your hands like thread pulled too carelessly. I stayed when your absence began to feel more familiar than your presence.
And somewhere in all of that, I began to disappear.
Not all at once. Not in any way that could be easily named. Just slowly. Like a house left unattended, where the walls begin to crack and the air grows heavier with each passing day. I kept the lights on for you long after you stopped coming back.
You were never cruel.
That would have been easier.
Cruelty is sharp and undeniable. It leaves marks you can point to and say “There. That is where it broke.” But you were softer than that. You left in small ways. You chose other things, other people, other moments, again and again, until I was no longer where you returned to, only where you paused.
And I let you.
That is the tragedy of it.
Not that you left, but that I learned to wait for you anyway. That I reshaped myself around your absence, convincing myself that if I was patient enough, quiet enough, understanding enough, you would eventually choose me the way I had already chosen you.
But you never did.
And now I can feel something changing in me.
Not loudly. Not all at once. But steadily like the tide pulling back after holding the shore for too long. The place where love lived is growing colder, quieter, less forgiving. And I know, with a certainty that feels almost like grief, what comes next.
I am going to hate you.
Not today. Not even tomorrow.
But one day, I will wake up and realize that the warmth I held for you has turned into something else entirely. Something sharp. Something final. Not because I ever wanted to stop loving you but because loving you like this left no other ending.
And that is what makes it unbearable.
Because I don’t want to hate you.
I wanted to keep you like candlelight. Flickering and fragile, but still beautiful. I wanted to believe that what we had was something worth enduring, something that would one day steady itself into something real.
Instead, it is becoming a ghost.
And you…..you were meant to haunt me.
Not as something I lost all at once, but as something I lost slowly, piece by piece, until there was nothing left to hold except the memory of how it once felt to hope.
If I had known this was how it would end, I still would have stayed.
That is the cruelest truth of all.
Because even now, standing in the ruins of it, I can still feel the echo of you. Some part of me, stubborn and aching, still wishes you had chosen me before I had to learn how to let you go.