I didn’t lose you.
That would have been easier to explain.
I simply arrived
when your heart had already learned
how to close doors gently.
I loved you without knowing
that timing could outweigh sincerity,
that honesty could still be insufficient,
that wanting something real
does not mean it is allowed to exist.
You didn’t push me away.
You didn’t reject me with cruelty.
You stood still long enough to see me clearly—
and then you chose not to stay.
That choice echoes.
—
I would have given you patience
instead of promises.
Time instead of urgency.
Space to breathe
without asking you to decide.
But you were tired of pauses.
Tired of half-formed possibilities.
Tired of carrying what might be
on top of everything that already was.
And I understood that
even while my heart resisted it.
—
There is a particular kind of pain
that comes from being understood
and still not chosen.
It doesn’t scream.
It settles.
It lives quietly in the chest,
returning at unexpected moments—
in silence,
in prayer,
in the spaces where your name
still feels natural.
—
I don’t blame you.
Blame would give this pain a direction,
and this pain has none.
It exists because something real
was allowed to form
and then asked to dissolve
without ever becoming solid.
We were not a mistake.
We were a moment that arrived
without permission from the future.
—
I would have stayed
inside the uncertainty with you.
I would have carried the questions gently,
waiting for life to soften around us.
But you needed certainty
more than possibility.
And love,
no matter how sincere,
cannot replace safety.
—
So I carry this quietly now.
Not as bitterness.
Not as regret.
But as a wound that healed
without ever closing.
You remain in me
not as someone I lost,
but as someone I recognized
too late to keep.
And that recognition—
that brief alignment—
will stay with me
long after the ache has learned
how to be silent.
