After the silence fell between us
I didn’t leave all at once
I stayed in the spaces you stopped filling,
talking to the ghost of us
like it might answer me differently this time.
I wore my feelings like unfinished sentences,
always almost saying what mattered most
but swallowing it right before it became truth.
There was still love in me
not loud, not clean,
but stubborn in the way it refused to die properly.
It lingered in my timing,
in the messages I never sent,
in the way I reread what I should’ve said
hours too late to change anything.
I became a man of almosts.
Almost texting.
Almost letting go.
Almost convincing myself
that moving on meant forgetting.
But I didn’t forget.
I just learned how to carry you quietly
in the back of my thoughts
where no one could see
how often you still crossed my mind
like a light that never fully switched off.
And even when pride tried to rebuild me,
it built around the ache, not over it.
So I stood there,
not broken in the way people imagine,
but reshaped
by everything I felt
and everything I never got to finish saying