The poet always wrote of leaving.
Not in grand, theatrical exits,
but in slow retreats,
half-answers, tired eyes,
and doors that closed more gently than they should.

There was kindness in the poet,
a softness rarely shown in full,
but it flickered,
burned out before it could ever warm a room completely.

They arrived with good promises.
Words stitched from hope and desperation,
trying to rewrite an ending they’d already rehearsed too many times.
Each stanza carried a vow:
This time, I’ll stay. This time, I’ll be better.

And for a moment, the rhythm held.
The poet laughed like someone who had finally unlearned the storm.
They listened. They stayed present.
They remembered birthdays.

But the silence came back,
not the peaceful kind,
but the one that curled at the edges of conversations,
the one that asked others to tiptoe around shadows
that had no names.

People tried.
Of course they did.
They folded patience into everything,
turned misunderstandings into metaphors,
turning pages, waiting for the poem to shift.

But the poet always returned to the beginning.
To mistrust dressed as wisdom,
to withdrawing before being misunderstood,
to believing love was a test of endurance,
not a space to rest in.

The pages wore thin.
Not from anger,
but from exhaustion.
No one wants to keep reading
when the story refuses to grow.

And the poet,
they knew.

They knew where it all frayed,
knew which line broke first,
which habits returned quietly like old houseguests
never truly gone.

They weren't blind.
They watched themselves ruin what they once prayed for.
Not with intention,
but with patterns they couldn’t ****,
and softness they couldn’t hold.

And as the final verse trembled to a close,
no anger, no pleading, no regret spilled across the page.
Just a familiar stillness,
the kind that comes when a person
has always known
how their story ends.

It's the small routines that bruise the hardest,
a message left unsent,
a joke half-formed with no one to send it to.
Not tragic. Just unfinished.

There's a certain way the day folds now,
like it skips a line only I notice.
Coffee tastes fine.
Mornings still happen.
But something feels like it forgot to arrive.

Names don't come up anymore,
but there's a pause where they used to.
Like the world's moved on
and my memory's still catching the bus.

I scroll less.
Talk less.
React slower.
Not because I'm sad,
just because fewer things feel like mine to respond to.

It's not about wanting anyone back.
It's not even about love.
It's about remembering what it felt like
to matter in someone's day
without trying.

And yeah,
maybe that was once,
or maybe I imagined most of it.

Either way,
I miss everything
that used to feel
a little bit like home.

She said it like a memory
she didn't care to keep
as if saying it aloud
would finally empty it from her chest.

He was once hers.
She was once his.
Two sentences with a shelf life,
said like an obituary
for something that died
before they even noticed it was sick.

There was no crescendo,
no last dramatic scene.
Just a series of quiet exits,
a laugh that didn't reach the eyes,
a message left on read,
a promise that showed up late
and never stayed.

And he?
He didn't even flinch.
Didn't ask for a second chance,
didn't fight for the version of her
he once thought he deserved.

Because maybe he knew.
That everything she said
was the echo of his own undoing.
And maybe he was tired,
not of her,
but of being the man
who only learns when it's too late.

He walks around now,
shoulders light,
heart hollow,
cold, but not frozen.
The kind of cold
you only feel after too many nights
staring at the ceiling,
wondering why the silence
started sounding like home.

And if you ask him what happened,
he'll say this with a calm so sharp
it could cut glass:

“Nothing.
Everything just went the way it always does.”

They stopped checking the clock.
Not because time healed anything,
but because time
stopped asking if they were okay.

Some days wore the face of routine,
brushed teeth,
answered calls,
nodded in the right places.
But beneath the rituals,
something hollow played house.

The heart became a landlord
of too many vacant rooms.
Echoes moved in.
Old voices. Unsent replies.
The kind of silence
you can trip over.

They tried planting hope in old soil,
but nothing took root.
Even sunlight felt staged,
like a set piece in a play
they forgot the lines to.

Laughter?
It came like a guest who forgot to knock,
stayed too long,
left without saying goodbye.
They didn’t chase it.
They just cleared the cups.

There were no breakdowns.
Only hairline cracks,
quietly running their course
through bone and habit.

People called it strength.
But it was mostly muscle memory.
The body, after all,
learns how to stand
even when the soul
has long sat down.

They stopped writing about healing.
Started writing about ceilings,
how low they felt,
how often they collapsed
without warning.

And still,
they kept walking.
Not forward,
not toward anything.
Just…
walking.

Because the cruelest part of pain
is that it doesn’t always scream.
Sometimes,
it just stays.

There's a kind of love that makes you second-guess your sanity.
Not because you're unstable, but because every time you ask,
“Are we okay?”
you're met with a sigh, a side-eye, or silence.

And somehow, that simple question
born from care, not control
becomes the thing you're made to feel guilty for.

So you adjust.
You water yourself down.
You hold back the words.
You tell yourself, “Maybe I am overthinking.”
You rehearse the timing of your concerns,
hoping next time, they'll be received better.
They're never received better.

Until one day, it hits you:
Love is not supposed to feel like trespassing.
You shouldn't feel the need to apologize
for needing to feel secure.
You shouldn't feel punished for caring too obviously.
Needing reassurance doesn't make you clingy,
it makes you human.

The problem was never that you needed too much.
The problem was that you asked someone
who offered too little.

And maybe that's what we all learn too late,
that love isn't proven in grand gestures or promises.
It's proven in the small moments,
when you say, “I'm scared,”
and they don't make you feel ashamed for it.

So here's the truth, simple and undramatic:
If you had to beg for the bare minimum,
you weren't loved
you were just convenient
until your honesty became inconvenient.

Waking up feels like a task.
Breathing, an obligation.
Each day repeats with no meaning.
I move, because stopping feels worse.
But moving leads nowhere.

People say, “keep going.”
They don’t know what they’re asking.
They’ve never carried this weight.
Or maybe they have, and they’re lying too.

Food has no taste.
Sleep brings no rest.
Laughter sounds distant.
Hope feels fake.

There is no dream.
No fire.
No reason.

I do what’s needed.
I wear the face.
I show up.

But inside,
Nothing changes.
Nothing feels.

Living isn’t living.
It’s just not dying yet.

It wasn’t the act,
but the knowing.

The way silence held the weight
of a promise once made,
then broken
with ease.

Not a mistake,
a decision,
deliberate,
measured
in the echo of things once said.

“I won’t, I promise.”
became
“it just happened.”

But nothing just happens
when you already know
what it would do
to someone
who trusted you
anyway.

They watched the ground split open
and still walked
the fault line.

Not blind.
Just willing.

And I, the after.
The leftover ache.
Learning again
that people can mean what they say
only until it’s inconvenient.