Work Text:
I think I started measuring time by your absence. Not clocks. Not calendars.
Just the spaces between the moments I thought my phone might light up with your name.
I became fluent in waiting. Waiting for a message. Waiting for a sign. Waiting for the impossible proof
that love could survive the distance between two people who kept disappearing from each other's lives.
I told myself two weeks was only two weeks. Then it became a month. Then two.
And somehow hope stretched itself thin enough to fit inside every excuse I could find.
Love, I learned, can make an architect out of anyone. I built homes out of maybes. I called them forever.
People say love is patient. They never tell you how patient fear can be.
Mine sat quietly in every conversation, listening for a change in your voice, counting the seconds before your reply,
studying every silence like it was a language I had forgotten how to speak.
I searched your words for exits before you'd even reached the end of the sentence.
I thought if I could predict being left, it would hurt less. It didn't.
I wanted to tell you what was happening inside my head, but thoughts don't arrive in neat little boxes. They arrive all at once,
like birds slamming themselves against a window.
By the time I found the words, they no longer sounded like mine. So I smiled. Changed the subject. Said I was fine
until "fine" became a room I couldn't find the door out of.
There were days I didn't recognize the person wearing my face.
Days my reflection felt like a stranger who happened to know my name.
I wondered how someone could promise forever when I couldn't even promise I'd be the same person tomorrow.
So I started standing farther away. Not because I loved you less. Because I loved you enough to believe you deserved someone
who wasn't always fighting their own mind.
It is a cruel thing, to mistake self protection for mercy. Crueler still to mistake pushing someone away for loving them.
You never asked me to become easier. You never asked me to become quieter. Those were promises I made to ghosts.
After we broke, I kept reaching for conversations that had already ended. I carried questions like stones. Did you stop loving me? Did you ever?
Did I imagine the future all by myself? Or did we both believe it until distance learned our names?
There are versions of us still alive somewhere. One where the timing was kinder. One where fear didn't speak louder than love.
One where I answered honestly when you asked how I was. One where you stayed. One where I knew how to let you.
I don't hate you. I hate that love wasn't enough to quiet the war inside my own head.
I hate that I kept looking over my shoulder for abandonment until we both became the ones walking away.
Maybe that is the saddest thing I have ever learned.
Sometimes you don't lose someone because you stopped loving them.
Sometimes you lose them because you spend so long trying to protect them from your darkness that one day they can no longer find you through it.
And if you ever wonder whether I loved you know this. I still catch myself looking for you in futures I no longer believe belong to me.
Not because I think you are coming back.
But because once upon a time, I loved you so completely that my heart forgot how to imagine tomorrow without you in it.