Somehow,
without warning,
our paths crossed again.
And somehow, without mercy,
it hurt—
not the sharp sting of a fresh wound,
but the slow ache of a scar
that remembers every time it bled.

It hurt to meet your gaze,
to see the shadow of who we were
lingering there.
My past hung heavy on your shoulders,
and the future we dreamed of
lay scattered in the spaces
between your eyes and mine.
It hurt to hear the silence between us,
so loud with the weight
of all the words we never spoke.

It hurt to see your smile—
that familiar curve of your lips,
a fragment of something I once called mine.
It was the same smile we shared
when the world felt like it belonged to us,
when we thought love
could bend time to our will.

It hurt to walk through the places we once loved,
places that still carry the echoes of us.
Every step felt like walking through shadows,
where promises were whispered
and never kept.
The walls still remember,
even if we’ve forgotten,
the weight of a love
too fierce to last.

It hurt.

For so long, it didn’t.
I had learned to survive you,
to quiet the echoes of your voice
and forget the way your touch
once anchored me.
I thought I was fine.
I could hear your name
without trembling,
see your face without breaking.

But today,
in the cold wind and gray sky,
the girl I used to be woke up.
The one who loved you
more than she loved herself,
who gave you every piece of her,
wept quietly inside me.
She reminded me of the days
when time folded into itself,
when moments felt eternal
and all I wanted was to freeze them,
to hold them still.

That love—
wild and consuming,
always too much,
never enough—
beat through me again,
a second heart,
pounding against the walls I built.

It hurt.
To see you.
To hold you.
To feel your arms,
once my safe harbor,
now pulling me deeper
into the hollow they left behind.

I tell myself I don’t want to see you again.
Not if it means reliving this,
not if it means drowning
in the memory of what we couldn’t save.
I tell myself I don’t want to see you again.

But still—
please, just one more time.
And if you hold me,
don’t hold me lightly,
don’t hold me politely.
Hold me like the weight of us
is too much to carry alone.
Hold me like the last time
we believed in forever.

And let me be the girl who believed it too,
even as the clock whispered
that forever was never ours to keep.