I don’t want to cry over us tonight.

I don’t want to unbury every word,

every silence with teeth in it,

Every pause that said more

than either of us ever did out loud.

I don’t want to wonder

whether I was too much,

or not enough,

or just the wrong kind of broken

to be loved gently.

I am tired.

Tired of replaying the tender parts

like a film from a burned-down theater.

Tired of reaching for what still wears your name

even while it slips through my hands

like smoke that used to be a home.

I don’t want to feel all of this tonight.

Not the ache nesting in my ribs.

Not the guilt crawling slowly beneath my skin.

Not the horror of loving someone deeply

and still feeling them drift

like a shoreline going dark.

Tonight, I want quiet.

Even if it is the kind of quiet

that feels like winter inside the bones.

Even if it is empty.

Even if it is only numbness

with its cold hand over my mouth.

Because the truth is,

I love you in a way that splits me open.

And I am terrified

I am the only one still standing

inside the ruins,

calling it devotion

when it may already be grief.

So just for tonight,

let me feel nothing.

Let me stop sifting through old messages

like ashes might still hold instructions.

Let me breathe

without trying to decode your distance.

Let me close my eyes

without finding your face there

like a wound that refuses to scar.

Because loving you has stopped feeling holy.

It feels like war now.

And I am so tired

of being both battlefield and body.

And with him now,

it does not feel like love.

It feels like a countdown.

Like standing barefoot at the cliff’s edge

and hearing the wind decide

whether or not to keep me.

I see it in his eyes,

the way recognition leaves them early.

The way he looks at me

like I am wearing the shape

of someone he has already buried.

I hear it in his silence, too.

Not empty silence.

Not harmless silence.

Silence with frost on its mouth.

Silence sharpened to a point.

It is not just pain anymore.

It feels like punishment.

Like something has curdled between us.

Like love left the room

and left something colder in its place

to watch me come apart slowly.

Maybe that is not fair.

Maybe grief has a talent

for dressing itself as prophecy.

But it still feels

like I am being taught a lesson

by someone who once held me

like I was the softest thing

he had ever touched.

That is the part that breaks me.

Not the leaving.

Not even the almost-leaving.

It is the staying

with all the warmth removed.

It is watching someone remain

just long enough

for the absence to become unbearable.

And beneath all of that

is the rot of my own self-hatred.

Not because I loved him.

Because I loved him with shaking hands.

Because I did not know

how to hold something good

without flinching.

Because old wounds kept speaking for me

in a language I should have buried years ago.

He gave me trust.

The rare kind.

The kind that does not come easy

and does not return twice.

And I was so tangled in my own ghosts,

my own fear,

my own habit of bracing for loss,

that I kept mistaking safety

for distance.

He did not deserve the version of me

that doubted tenderness

simply because it stayed.

He did not deserve

to be tested by wounds

he did not make.

He did not deserve

to love someone

who kept one hand on the door

while begging not to be abandoned.

Now I see the change in him

and it is a mirror

I cannot look away from it.

The warmth is different.

The way he says my name

lands wrong now,

like it no longer belongs in his mouth.

And I hate myself

for understanding too late.

Hate that my brokenness bled into us.

Hate that the love I wanted to protect

ended up drowning

under the weight of everything

I had not healed.

Sometimes I feel like a curse.

Like I take beautiful things

and love them with so much fear

they cannot breathe.

And what kills me most

is knowing I might have been enough

if I had only known

how to believe it

before the fracture,

before the frost,

before this slow undoing.

So I sit here now

with grief in my throat,

guilt in my veins,

and love still dragging its chains

through every room inside me.

I miss who he was with me.

I miss who I was

before everything became suspicion,

before every tenderness felt temporary,

before I started reading endings

into every silence.

And the question beneath it all

circles over me like a black-winged thing:

Is this what love is supposed to feel like?

Because if this is love,

why does it feel like erasure?

Why do I feel haunted

by someone still standing in front of me?

Why do I feel lonelier beside him

than I ever did alone?

And still,

despite the wreckage,

despite the cold,

despite the part of me

that knows better,

every unnamed feeling

still turns its face toward him.

Maybe that is the cruelest part.

That even now,

I love him like a house still burning

loves the match.

And if he leaves,

if he finally decides

there is nothing here worth saving,

I do not think it will kill me cleanly.

It will not be one wound.

It will be a thousand small endings

all happening in the same body.

Not because I will be alone.

I have survived alone before.

But because I will still love him

while standing in the ashes

of everything I helped ruin.

That is the confession.

Not that I was innocent.

Not that he was cruel.

Not that love betrayed us neatly.

It is this:

sometimes the most unbearable grief

is not losing love.

It is realizing

You were too wounded

to hold it properly

when it was still yours.