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.

Something 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 spaces
where something softer
should have lived.

I mistook your distance for mystery.

Your inconsistency for depth.

As if loving you
was meant to feel like
deciphering something ancient
and half-forgotten.

But love isn’t meant to feel like guessing.

Still, I stayed.

I stayed the first time
you chose something else over me.

Told myself it was nothing.

I stayed when plans unraveled
at your hands
like thread pulled too loosely.

I stayed when your absence
became 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.

Walls beginning to crack.

Air growing 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.

It leaves something you can point to.

Say, there.

That is where it broke.

But you were quieter than that.

You left in small ways.

Chose other things.

Other people.

Other moments.

Again and again
until I wasn’t where you returned to.

Only where you paused.

And I let you.

That’s the part that stays with me.

Not that you left.

That I kept waiting.

That I reshaped myself
around your absence.

Convinced myself
that if I was patient enough,
quiet enough,
understanding enough,

you would choose me
the way I had already chosen you.

But you never did.

And now I can feel something changing in me.

Not all at once.

Not loudly.

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 what comes next.

I am going to hate you.

Not today.

Not even tomorrow.

But one day
I will wake up
and feel it.

The warmth I held for you
turned into something else.

Something sharp.

Something final.

Not because I wanted to stop loving you,

but because loving you like this
left no other ending.

And that’s what makes it unbearable.

Because I don’t want to hate you.

I wanted to keep you
like candlelight.

Flickering.

Fragile.

Still beautiful.

I wanted to believe
what we had
would steady itself
into something real.

Instead, it’s becoming a ghost.

Not something I lost all at once.

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’s the part
I can’t make sense of.

Because even now,
standing in what’s left of it,

I can still feel you.

And some part of me,
stubborn and aching,

still wishes
you had chosen me
before I had to learn
how to let you go.

(I stayed long after I knew how it would end, and I’m still learning what that cost me.)