I used to love you.

Or perhaps I loved the mystery,
the almost,
the way you could make a home
out of a moment
and leave before morning.

I mistook your presence for permanence,
your attention for intention,
your nearness for something
that knew how to stay.

You were a beautiful question
I kept answering for you.

And I was so young in my understanding
that I called the ache love,
called the waiting patience,
called the shadows
a place where something sacred
might be growing.

How strange,
the things we make holy
when we want them badly enough.

I remember the woman I was.
She searched for meaning
in the spaces between your words.
She gathered fragments
and held them to the light,
hoping they might become
the shape of something true.

She thought if she could just see clearly enough,
you might finally see yourself.

But some mirrors are not broken
because they show us what we are.
They are abandoned
because we do not like the reflection.

I don’t know what you tell yourself about me.
I don’t know which version of the story
lets you sleep peacefully.

I only know
I no longer need to be in it.

Once, I wanted to be understood by you.
Now, I understand why I never was.

And there is a difference
between being seen
and being useful to someone’s loneliness.

I spent so long wondering
what I had mistaken,
what I had missed,
what part of me had been
too much, too sharp, too aware.

Now I wonder why
I ever made your inability to meet me
a measure of my worth.

Perhaps you thought
I was fighting you.

I wasn’t.

I was fighting the distance
between what I felt
and what I could finally see.

And when I laid down that fight,
there you were
no longer a mystery,
no longer a possibility,
just a man
I once knew how to love.

I used to love you.

I say it now
without longing,
without bitterness,
without the smallest wish
to be proven wrong.

Some things do not end
with a slammed door.

Some things end
when the illusion grows quiet,
when the heart stops translating,
when the soul no longer mistakes
recognition for destiny.

I used to love you.

But I have met the woman
who survived the wanting.

And she no longer wants you.

She knows the difference now
between a door left open
and a place she belongs.

She knows that not every silence
is a wound,
not every absence
is a loss,
and not every person
who finds their way into your heart
was ever meant to live there.

I used to love you.

Now, I let you remain
what you always were
in the end:

a chapter
that taught me how to read
between the lines.

And I have turned the page.