I thought loving you would soften over time.. fade into something easier, something I could carry without it cutting into me. 14 years say otherwise. It lives in the small things.. the way I still turn to tell you everything first, the way your name rises in my throat like a prayer I never learned how to stop saying.
And now I’m standing here watching you promise forever to someone who isn’t me, and I don’t know where to put all the lifetimes I built for us in my head.. all the quiet, fragile futures that never made it out of my chest. You look at him like he is the answer to a question I’ve been asking my whole life.. and maybe he is.
But fuck it hurts in a way that feels endless, like something inside me is being asked to keep beating without the part it learned to beat for. I want to be good for you. I want to mean it when I smile, when I hold you, when I tell you I’m happy.. and somewhere, buried under all of this, I am.. but it’s buried beneath the grief of being almost everything and still not being chosen.
You say “I do,” and I feel every version of us collapse at once.. every maybe, every almost, every if.. I can’t stop loving you. I don’t think I ever will. I just learn.. in this moment.. how to live with it.. like a wound that never closes.. just something I carry quietly for the rest of my life..
