It should’ve been easy… I think.
The moment your toothbrush hit the bottom of the garbage can, I flinched. It was not the finality—not exactly. It was the dull thunk that seemed to echo around my apartment, unceremonious and unassuming, that got me reaching for my phone to call my best friend.
“Can you come over?” I asked. She hung up and was at my door in fifteen minutes. I remember thinking then: “it should’ve been this easy, right?” To never have to explain why. To be understood wholly. To never have to shrink.
That everything could end like any other Thursday night felt mockingly holy.
I called the reason “mundane” as if shrinking myself one last time would make better sense. “It was just a halo-halo stand,” I said, smile on my face. I didn’t say that it was years of doing just this—making things that felt big to me seem small—that delivered the final sentence. And I was halfway out the door before any of it truly landed.
Now, our photos are in a pile set on fire. Who were we in them? I could tie each one to a memory that told me exactly who: tinders that could ignite, flames that were destructive. And I scatter our ashes over the tombstones of my past selves—the selves I now refuse to count as losses.
I didn’t burn. Not this time.
So I strolled by myself around the mall I used to walk around with your hand in mine. I rode the escalator without looking if you were just one step behind. I got in a car the same color as yours and thought “it should’ve been easy.”
Because it is. When it is true, it is. I know because it was easy for me to love you well even then. That it could only remain in the past is perhaps my only regret.
There are freedoms that sound like battlecries and freedoms that come in hushed, unhurried whispers. Mine, however, sounded like unabashed, cackling laughter. It came looking like dangling earrings, colorful tops, and red lipstick. Liberation felt like looking in the mirror and believing I am easy to love. And I am embracing it like a soldier finally coming home.
