The hardest part is that it never starts with anything big. Not a fight. Not a threat. Not even a real problem, most of the time. It starts with a sentence that feels slightly colder than usual. A missing emoji. A delayed reply. A word you normally use but suddenly don’t.
To you, it is nothing. To me, it is the sound of every old alarm in my body going off at once.
And I know how irrational it must look from the outside. How exhausting it must be to explain why a period at the end of a text can make my stomach drop. But trauma does not care whether the danger is real. It only cares whether it feels familiar. Somewhere along the way, my mind learned that people leaving rarely announce it. They just become different first.
So when I ask if something is wrong, I am not accusing you of anything. I am searching the horizon for a storm that may not even exist. Because I have spent so long preparing for abandonment that sometimes I mistake the shadows of it for the real thing.
And the worst part is that I know this is not your burden to carry. These fears belonged to my past long before they ever met you. But some days they are so loud that I cannot tell the difference between what is happening and what I am afraid will.
