Once, in a quiet valley, there lived a fox unlike any other.
Its fur caught the light like fire in the dusk,
and its laugh, yes, the fox laughed,
was so strange and sharp that even the trees seemed to lean closer to hear it.

The fox did not laugh for everyone.
To strangers, it was cautious, silent, almost shy.
But for those it trusted,
the laugh would pour out like a stream after rain,
wild and unafraid.
It was a gift.

In time, the fox chose to walk beside a man.
The man carried old wounds hidden beneath his skin,
scars left by shadows he once mistook for friends.
And though the fox was nothing like those shadows,
the man could not stop himself from seeing ghosts in every movement.

One day, he saw the fox wander through the valley alone.
It was not strange, the fox was free, after all,
but in the man’s mind, the scene twisted,
turning into whispers of deceit.
Old fears rose like smoke,
and before he could catch his breath,
his tongue became a blade.

He accused.
Not softly, not carefully,
but with the force of someone certain they had been wronged.

The fox stopped laughing.
It did not growl, did not bare its teeth.
It simply looked at him,
and in that look was the weight of something breaking.
Without another sound, it turned away
and vanished into the forest.

Seasons passed.
The man walked the valley every day,
listening for the laugh that once followed him like sunlight through leaves.
But the air stayed still.
The forest stayed silent.

Only then did the man see the truth:
The fox had not betrayed him.
It had only been living, breathing,
trusting him to understand.
And he had answered that trust with suspicion and fire.

In the valley, the man grew old.
And sometimes, in the distance,
he thought he heard that strange laugh again,
but it was only the wind,
mocking him with the memory of what he had thrown away.

There was once a person I remember,
let's still call them Echo.
Not for their meaning,
but for their noise.
Not for memory,
but for how impossible they were to forget.

Echo didn’t speak. Echo overwhelmed.
Decibels over decency,
volume over value.
Always shouting,
always stepping over lines
drawn by people too kind to fight back.

Strangers saw the costume,
soft-spoken, polite, reserved.
But that was just the audition.
Acquaintance cued the transformation.
Echo unleashed like rusted gates unhinged,
screaming at the world like it owed reverence.

But the tragedy was this:
Echo mistook volume for confidence,
insults for charisma,
mockery for charm.
Words wrapped in sarcasm,
daggers dressed as jokes.

Humor was the shield,
but only for Echo.
For everyone else, it was shrapnel.
Every “just kidding”
left a scar behind.
Every laugh felt like bleeding.

Echo attacked without conscience,
like a sword with no handle,
slashing friend and foe alike.
There was no reasoning.
No moral compass.
Just chaos wearing a grin.

Confront Echo?
They'd spin it.
Call it honesty.
Call it realness.
But raw sewage is honest,
and no one wants to swim in it.

Echo didn’t want growth,
just permission to stay broken.
Echo didn’t want change,
just applause for staying the same.
And those who clapped?
They were cowards, too.

They wore silence like armor,
confused tolerance for loyalty.
But enabling rot
only grows the mold.
And mold doesn’t care who breathes it in.

Echo believed adjustment was a one-way street,
that everyone else should bend,
fold,
shrink
to fit the tantrums.
As if being known
meant being excused.

But what Echo never understood,
and never will,
is that decency isn’t negotiable,
and being loud
doesn’t make you heard.

Because Echo was never brave.
Just unfiltered,
unrefined,
unaware.
A storm with no direction,
a tantrum with a name.

Echo never wielded words.
They bludgeoned with them.
They didn’t connect,
they conquered.
Not because they were clever,
but because no one dared to mirror the cruelty back.

And here’s the final cut:
Echo wasn’t misunderstood.
Echo was just exhausting.
Echo was never excluded.
Echo was evicted by peace.

Let Echo howl in circles.
Let every soul who shares that skin
feel the blade of this truth:
you are not feared because you're strong,
you’re avoided because you're intolerable.

And no, it’s not the world’s job
to cradle a blade
just because it came from you.

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.