You arrived in my life quietly,
the way snow enters forests—
without witnesses,
without sound,
changing everything before I even noticed.
At first, I mistook that change for destiny.
I built temples out of your smallest gestures.
Turned ordinary conversations into sacred texts.
Held your sadness like holy water in trembling hands,
convinced that if I carried enough of it,
I would earn the right to remain beside you forever.
The world became smaller after loving you.
Smaller and stranger.
Every road led back to your name.
Every song sounded unfinished without your shadow inside it.
Even the stars above me looked temporary,
as if the sky itself were waiting for your approval.
Nothing changed for a very long time.
So I kept loving you in exhausting, beautiful ways.
I loved you through confusion.
Through pauses long enough to become oceans.
Through nights where your silence sat beside me
like a third person in the room.
Sometimes you looked at me
like you were trying to love me correctly.
And I smiled back
like I was trying to survive it gracefully.
Then the smallest things began changing.
Your laughter no longer echoed inside me after you left.
Your absence stopped feeling like death
and started feeling like weather.
I remember standing alone one evening,
watching clouds drag themselves across the mountains,
thinking:
perhaps love is not measured
by how desperately we hold on,
but by how honestly we let go.
That thought frightened me.
Because the truth kept changing shape every time I touched it.
Was I heartbroken?
Or merely devoted to the tragedy of us?
Did I want you—
or did I want to remain the version of myself
that existed while chasing you?
For weeks, I carried those questions
like stones in my mouth.
Then one morning, the answer arrived softly.
No thunder.
No divine revelation.
Just sunlight falling across my hands
while the world continued existing without permission from my grief.
And suddenly, I understood.
You were never the love of my life.
You were the mirror that taught me
how badly I wanted to be capable of loving completely.
That realization changed everything after it.
The pain lost its theatre.
The longing lost its crown.
Even my poems began breathing differently.
I stopped turning suffering into romance.
Stopped calling emotional starvation “fate.”
Stopped trying to force eternity
into something already preparing to leave.
And when you reached for me one final time,
I did not hate you.
I did not collapse.
I simply stepped back with a tired kind smile,
the way travelers wave at cities
they know they will never return to.
Some goodbyes are not tragedies.
Some are the merciful end
of becoming someone smaller for love.
Now I stand here—
at the edge of this old version of myself—
and the wind feels different than it used to.
Everything is changing once again.
The horizon no longer terrifies me.
Tomorrow no longer feels like betrayal.
There are still oceans I have not seen,
streets I have not wandered through at midnight,
people who will know my laughter
without inheriting my wounds.
For the first time in a long while,
life does not feel like something happening to me.
It feels like a mountain beneath my feet.
And standing here,
with the sky open like forgiveness above my head,
I think I can finally smile when I say this:
thank you for the love you could not give me.
Thank you for the ache.
Thank you for the changes.
[Imagine standing at the top of a mountain with the wind against your skin, the world stretched endlessly beneath you, and Lover, You Should've Come Over playing softly in your ears while these words appear like subtitles across the sky. Maybe then, for a moment, you’ll feel what this poor poet once carried within them too. And if this poem found a place inside you somewhere, I hope you’ll stay a little longer for the next one. Have a beautiful day, stranger :)]
dailybridgerton
kianamaiart
yousharknotpass
