She returned to the words she once confessed,
A life of fleeting crushes she likes best.
No ties to hold, no promises made,
I thought she’d grown, but she stayed the same shade.

I hoped for change, for love to endure,
But her heart chose freedom, wild and unsure.
I was a fool to believe she’d stay,
For some things never change, they just fade away.

We ended like a storm that passed too fast,
Leaving nothing but silence in the aftermath.
The words we never spoke now hang in the air,
Like smoke from a flame that was never quite there.

Each day feels like a ship lost at sea,
Drifting farther from where we used to be.
Hope fades like the evening light,
And I fear she’ll never see me, even in the night.

She says I left her with scars unseen,
That I’m the reason for wounds unclean.
Funny, though, how swift she fled,
No warnings spoken, just words unsaid.

On the spot, my world collapsed,
Seven years erased, the bond unwrapped.
She claims her pain, yet here I stand,
Holding the shards with trembling hands.

Did I harm her? Did I not care?
Or is blame easier to bear?
While I drown in questions I can’t defy,
She moves ahead without a goodbye.

I saw a daisy flower that grew under your eyes.
Each time you cry, they bloom too.
Should you let it grow? That flower that is once a seed?
Or let it turn into a daisy flower that makes you want to cede?
I thought it was charming, that flower.
You kept it growing, didn't let it wither.
There should be no reason for that flower,
To attract you to thither.
Your tears let it grow.
The seed you had in you.
Since then, no smile on your face had shown.

Did I fall short, or did I misread
The ways I tried to give her all she’d need?
Each word I spoke, each touch, each vow,
Feels hollow now, like it wasn’t enough somehow.

She writes of dreams, of love she longs to find,
Of feeling wanted, held in heart and mind.
But wasn’t that what I tried to be?
Or was I blinded by what I hoped she’d see?

If someone new can heal her scars,
Can be her light, her moon and stars,
Then I’ll step back, though it stings to know
That all I gave couldn’t help her grow.

So here I stand, with open hands,
An echo left in fading sands,
Wondering where my love went wrong,
While she finds her way, where I don’t belong.

I am just a nobody
I am just an ugly human
No one will look my way
No one will hear what I say

I felt this more now
After with her
I realized that I am a nobody
In this cruel world

She seems happier now than she was with me,
A brightness in her I never could see.
I never stopped her from spreading her wings,
I only asked for respect in small things.

Perhaps my love was too heavy to bear,
A weight she carried but couldn’t repair.
Now she’s free, and I’m left to reflect,
On what I gave and what she could accept.

Go ahead.
Go like someone else.
Love someone new again.
After loving me,
You deserve someone worthy.
Did you really love me?
Because of how fast you find someone else?
Of how quick you are to forget,
That I was once with you,
I was once for you,
But not anymore,
clearly,
You like that person
much more.

Did I just get replaced by a friend she met anew?
I, who was once her world, now stand outside the view.
A stranger who stepped in, filling spaces I left bare,
Now holds the place I thought was ours to share.

Our roles have shifted, like night turning to dawn,
I, the familiar, find myself withdrawn.
And he, a newcomer in the chapters of her day,
Becomes the comfort where I used to stay.

It’s strange how quickly life can rearrange,
How swiftly hearts can feel so estranged.
I drift as a memory, faint and out of sight,
While he lights her path through each passing night.

Even metaphors get tired
when they start meaning exactly what they say.
No veils. No cleverness.
Just weight.

I used to write in symbols,
now everything sounds like a flat line
dressed in rhythm.
Not dead,
just uninterested in pretending.

There's no poetry in routine.
No metaphor for fading.
It just does.

Somewhere, a line I never said
keeps repeating itself in silence.
And that's the only echo left.

I stopped looking for shape in the noise.
It no longer bends for me.
Even the static feels deliberate now.

I still write,
but not for anyone.
Not even for myself.

Just to see
if the page will flinch.

I was once fooled by you,
Your words, your promises
I handled it, said it was a thing of the past
I got through it

Then I got fooled again.
Twice.
By your words, your promises,
I let myself believe you.

I knew you weren't gonna change,
Not your past mistakes,
Not your past actions,
You're the same as you were,
Before.

She drifts away, day by day, so slow,
While I’m bound to memories that won’t let go.
She’s healing, living, meeting someone new,
And I’m stuck in shadows, split in two.

She smiles again, while I hold on tight,
To faded moments, lost to the night.
Promises burst like bubbles in air,
Forgotten whispers, no longer there.

She moves with ease, and I fall behind,
Caught in the ties I can’t unwind.
Her world expands, while mine stands still,
Haunted by dreams I can’t fulfill.

So here I stay, as she walks free,
A memory chained, lost at sea.
She’s found her light, her life ahead,
While I’m left with words unsaid.

It’s strange how quickly they try to forget,
How swiftly they turn to leave,
How eagerly they look for someone new,
Just to erase our shadows, to bury our ghost.

Was I just a stepping stone all along,
A path for them to find someone they deserve?
A fleeting chapter in their story,
So they could finally love and truly belong.

But I couldn't.
I couldn't even force myself.
To let go, to move forward.
How I wish, I would just be gone.

They gathered around her when I let go,
Her hopeless heart, saved by those she now knows.
Grateful, she smiles at the one who's near,
A friend of a year, erasing my years.

I see her turn to him, the boy I once feared,
Confessing his heart while I disappear.
Seven long years, now shadows in vain,
While he holds the space I can’t reclaim.

I was her anchor through storms and despair,
But my presence now vanishes, thin as the air.
Jealousy burns, yet I stand here alone,
Watching her heal in a world I don’t own.

Useless, the love I gave, now a ghost,
She found in another what I valued most.
Seven years wasted, or so it feels—
Replaced by a bond that suddenly heals.

How do I find someone new, like what you did?
How do I focus my feelings on other people, like you?
How do I forget us, as you find again someone new?
How do I throw away the past, like nothing happened?
How do I disregard my promises, like what you did?
How do I end it all?

There was once a soul who waited,
not for riches or for fame,
but for the warmth of simple words,
and the keeping of a name.

Each promise carried weight unspoken,
each “later” tied a fragile thread,
but silence came and filled the spaces,
where presence should have been instead.

The heart did not break in thunder,
no storm tore it apart,
it faded slowly, day by day,
from being half-forgotten in the dark.

This is how people drift away,
not in fire, not in fights,
but in the quiet moments missed,
in the absence of good nights.

And in the end, the hardest cost:
a promise delayed is a promise lost.

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.

The sorrow did not arrive with thunder,
it crept, a slow suffocation,
until the chest forgot how to rise,
until the veins pulsed only with silence.

It was not merely pain,
but a drowning,
each breath dragged through glass,
each thought heavier than stone.

Sleep gave no refuge,
dreams became ruins,
and waking was worse,
a return to a world stripped of color,
a place where even hope was ash.

This was sadness at its cruelest,
a weight too vast for flesh,
too sharp for memory,
a darkness so complete
it left the soul hollow,
aching, and numb all at once.

I was just being myself.
that's all it ever was.
no hidden meanings,
no hearts being passed around,
just someone healing,
trying to stay kind.

I laughed in spaces that felt safe,
joked around in places where I thought
I was understood.
not everything was a signal.
not every word meant more than it said.

but people like to watch
and fill in the blanks
with their own versions of me.
it's easier that way,
to turn a person into a rumor
than to ask them how they really feel.

they said they respected my privacy,
but what do you call it
when you're left out of conversations
you didn't even know you were in?
when sarcasm starts to sound familiar,
and silence feels like a choice?

I explained myself once.
twice.
maybe more.
but no one ever asked again.
they just looked,
and decided.

and maybe this won't mean anything,
or maybe it'll sting a little,
if the shoe fits.

but if you ever wonder why I stopped trying,
it's because friendship shouldn't
feel like defending myself
in a room full of people
who once called me home.

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.

You talk like you know something
but for all your noise,
you still can't name what I did.

Not clearly.
Not once.
Just scattered words,
bent into shapes that fit your story better than the truth ever could.

You saw ten seconds of me.
then made up the rest.
Convenient, right?
To turn a joke you didn't get
into a crime that never happened.

You never asked.
Never checked.
Just decided.

And now you speak with such certainty,
as if twisting my words
makes yours hold weight.

You mocked how I speak
because you couldn't understand it.
You called it fake
because real things confuse people like you.

You wanted a version of me that you could condemn
without guilt.
You needed someone to blame
so you picked the one who didn't fight back.

You called her names,
not because they were true,
but because you were out of arguments.
When you have nothing to say,
you start reaching for appearance.

You said I redirect blame.
Show me.
Where?
What did I do?

You can't.
Because you don't have facts.
Just feelings.
Just whispers you turned into headlines.

You talk like you're sharp,
but all I see is pride in a house of cards.
So desperate to be right
you forgot to be honest.

So speak.
Twist.
Perform.

Just don't pretend it's truth
when you still
can't even say
what it is
you're so angry about.

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.

There's a light
coming in under the door.
Too dim to be helpful,
too steady to ignore.

You forgot what you came here for,
but now that you're here,
you stay anyway.

A memory brushes past.
Not clearly.
Just enough to make your chest tighten
without knowing why.

The room feels too still.
You hear your own breathing,
then try not to.

Something inside wants to speak,
but the words don't fit right.
Like shoes a size too small.
You leave them at the threshold.

The silence turns warm.
Not comforting,
but familiar.
You've met it before,
and it hasn't changed much.

Then,
a shift.
Barely there.
The kind that makes your eyes sting,
but not from pain.

You look away.
Or maybe inward.
And just like that,
you feel everything,
then nothing,
then everything again.

I don't remember when it started.
The silence.
The leaving.
The ache that never asks for attention,
but never stops asking to be felt.

People say time heals.
I think it just teaches you how to walk
while carrying everything you've buried.
Grief has no finish line.
It just learns to sit beside you,
uninvited,
unmoving.

I've lost more than names.
I've lost voices I used to hear every day.
Hands I used to hold.
Warmth I used to believe would stay.
And not all of them died,
some just left,
as if I was easy to unlove.

My father is a memory now.
So are my dogs.
So are the parts of me
that once believed the world could be soft.

And the worst part?
I keep trying.
I still open up,
still let people in,
even when the past keeps warning me not to.

But they always go.
Quietly.
Suddenly.
Like they were never here to begin with.

Sometimes I wonder what's wrong with me.
Other times I'm just too tired to wonder.

I laugh with people.
I listen.
I stay up helping everyone else heal,
but I come home to an empty inbox.
To a room that forgets I exist
the moment I close the door.

It's not just loneliness.
It's being unseen,
even when you're right in front of them.
It's realizing your absence
doesn't interrupt anyone's life but your own.

I've cried in the dark
so no one would have to carry it.
I've hidden so much pain
just to be easier to love.
And still, they leave.

Still,
they leave.

I wish I was cold.
Detached.
Untouched by it all.
But I'm not.
I'm soft.
I'm breaking and still offering my hands.
I'm hurting and still hoping someone
might choose to stay.

Even now,
I want to be seen.
Not for what I pretend to be,
but for all of it,
the mess,
the ache,
the heart that never stopped opening,
even when it kept getting torn apart.

If I am a story,
I am one no one finishes reading.
But I write myself anyway.

Just in case someone
ever wants to know how it 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.

Once, his days were colored by her voice,
a sound so bright it painted the silence,
made even the smallest hours
feel like they carried meaning.

He remembers it still,
like a lantern's glow kept in a jar,
warm, flickering,
but dimmer each time he opens it.

There was a season
when her laughter was the wind in his sails,
when every "good morning"
felt like a promise the world was kinder
than he ever dared believe.

But seasons do not last.
Even spring, with all its blossoms,
must give way to the weight of time.

And so the days pass.
He still feels her,
like the ghost of perfume on an old scarf,
or the echo of footsteps in an empty hall.
It lingers, but softer now,
a whisper instead of a shout.

This is how love fades,
not with the cruelty of sudden silence,
but with the gentleness of distance,
a slow unraveling of threads
that once held his heart together.

He does not curse it,
nor cling to it as he once did.
For he knows now,
love does not vanish,
it transforms.

And one day,
when the ache is only a shadow,
he will look back at her smile in memory,
and instead of breaking,
he will simply whisper,

"thank you."

He gave her his dawns,
his nights, his trembling heart,
but when silence came,
her sorrow leaned heavier
for another name.

She wept for a ghost
that was never hers,
and he, the Fool,
learned the cruelest truth,
that love can be given,
yet grief belongs elsewhere.

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.

Funny,
how people break promises
like twigs underfoot,
loud enough to hear,
small enough to ignore.

They hand you a vow
with velvet words,
tie it in ribbons,
say "You can trust me."
You do.

Then comes the silence.
The flinch.
The "Why are you so sensitive?"
As if it wasn’t them
who lit the match
and called the smoke your imagination.

They break it,
the promise, the trust,
sometimes the last bit of you
that believed people mean what they say.

Then they watch you bleed
and ask why you’re making such a mess.

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.”

It wasn't anything special,
just a way of showing up,
laughs a little too loud,
says things without weighing them,
because not everything
needs to mean something.

People watched from the edge,
turned moments into stories,
shared glances like headlines.
Suddenly, I was someone
they had figured out
without asking.

I've seen the way
quiet shifts in a room,
how sarcasm replaces names,
how people choose
what fits their version of you
and stick with it.

They said they cared,
said they respected distance,
but only when it made
enough sense to them.
Everything else?
Fair game for guessing.

So I stopped explaining.
Not out of pride,
just exhaustion.
Some truths aren't meant
to be repeated
just to be ignored again.

Not everything I do
is a secret message.
Some things are just me,
existing,
without needing
to be decoded.

If it looked a certain way,
it probably did,
to those watching
without context,
without asking,
but still certain they knew.

There were two travelers who once found each other at a crossroads.
Both carried broken maps, torn by storms and years of wandering,
and for a time, they walked together.

They promised, or so the man thought,
that if the roads grew too heavy,
they would pause, mend their maps,
and meet again when they were whole.
To him, it was not the end,
but a waiting place,
a promise left under the shade of a tree.

But to her, it was farewell.
Not cruel, not heartless,
simply the closing of a chapter she had already read through.
And so while he lingered beneath the tree,
believing she would return,
she had already turned toward another path,
her footsteps steady, her gaze fixed forward.

He did not hate her for this.
How could he?
They were both free to walk where they wished.
But as he watched her figure fade into the distance,
he could not help but wonder,
how could love that once felt like fire in the veins
be set down so quickly, as if it were nothing more than ash?

He searched his chest for answers.
Perhaps he had carried their love as a seed,
waiting for spring,
while she had carried it as a bloom,
beautiful, fleeting, and already finished.

And so the man stayed by the tree,
haunted by the weight of a promise
he now realized was only his.

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.

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.

The days arrive and depart,
each one quieter than the last,
like footsteps fading down a hallway
with no promise of return.

The hours spill into one another,
and every face looks the same,
blurred outlines of voices
that do not reach me.

I have tried to fill the silence,
with routine, with work, with anything
that makes the clock seem less cruel,
yet still it beats against my ribs.

Memories linger like smoke,
not enough to hold,
but too thick to ignore,
choking even in their absence.

And when all else fades into dust,
when nothing is left to want or to keep,
the absence sharpens into the only truth,
but its existence is the one I keep longing for.

It’s startling how fast they forget,
How swiftly their hearts reset.
Barely a pause, not even a sigh,
Before someone new catches their eye.

Was I so easy to leave behind?
All the years gone in the blink of time.
Their love replaced in a hurried stride,
While I’m still lost on the other side.

If love was real, wouldn’t it stay?
But they found another without delay.
And here I stand, watching them go,
Wondering if I ever mattered, though.

He once thought the hardest part
was losing her,
but he was wrong.

The real wound came later,
when he saw her laugh with someone else,
that same laugh that had once
split his silence wide open.

It was not betrayal,
not even cruelty,
just the simple cruelty of life,
how quickly the sacred
becomes ordinary again.

Another would learn her pauses,
her little turns of phrase,
the way she tilted her head
before saying something soft.
Another would walk the paths
he thought were carved for him.

And he,
helpless,
watched the living memory unfold.
Not a ghost of her,
but a ghost of himself,
standing outside the firelight,
unwelcome, unnecessary,
a chapter left open
but never read again.

Some nights he would whisper,
not to her,
but to the empty air,
"I am still here,
bleeding quietly,
while you write your next beginning."

For ghosts do not come from the dead,
they come from the living,
and nothing is crueler
than seeing your forever
become someone else’s beginning.

If I disappear quietly,
don’t paint me as a tragedy,
just remember I was always trying.

Trying to do better,
for everyone, for myself,
even when I was running on empty.

I reached out first.
Again and again.
Fought through silence,
through the ache of being easy to forget.

I stayed kind
when the world gave me every reason not to be.
I answered quickly,
waited slowly,
hoped stupidly.

All I ever wanted
was to matter without having to fight for it.

But I got tired of proving I deserve space.
Tired of showing up for people
who didn’t notice when I went quiet.

"Trying to do better",
that was always my line.
Even when I didn’t know what better looked like anymore.
Even when it felt like I was the only one still trying.

So if one day I don’t make it,
don’t say I gave up.
Just say I ran out of places
to put all the weight I carried
for far too long
without anyone noticing.

I never wanted anything more
than to be okay.

I swear,
I tried.

I leave my smile
to those who swore it was real,
who mistook the curve of my lips
for a map to happiness.

I leave my silence
to those who filled it with their own truths,
who dictated what I felt
while never asking what I carried.

I leave my laughter, brittle as glass,
to the rooms that echoed it back
without hearing the crack beneath.

And my sorrow,
I bury it with me,
for no one believed it lived here anyway.

This is all I have to give,
not money, not treasures,
only the remnants of a heart
misnamed, misread,
and finally laid to rest.

Some days arrive without their weight,
as if the hours forget what they were meant to carry.
A spark appears, almost by accident,
and the air feels easier to breathe.

It never asks for much,
a word, a laugh,
something so small it shouldn't matter,
yet somehow it does.

But nothing lingers forever.
The glow drifts quietly away,
and the silence settles back in place,
familiar as an old companion.

And I don't call it unfair.
I don't chase what's gone.
It's simply the way days return to themselves,
steady, unchanging, whole again.

It wasn't just someone walking away.
It was the quiet that followed.
The kind that sits in your chest
long after the door has closed,
echoing in a house that once felt full.

I lost the way I spoke without thinking.
I lost the weight of being understood.
I lost the habit of reaching for a hand
that's no longer there,
the instinct to share something small,
a thought, a laugh, a bad day,
and the grief when no one replies.

There are no loud endings.
Just days that look the same,
measured only by what's missing.
Sleep that doesn't rest,
meals eaten out of necessity,
a world that keeps spinning
when I feel stuck in a moment
that already passed.

I lost more than I can explain,
and maybe I'm still losing.
Not in pieces,
but slowly, quietly,
in ways no one sees.