It Was Never Just Falling Out of Love

It Was Never Just Falling Out of Love

You say you fell out of love— like the glass had cracked, spilling out the meaning of dreams, the sting of shared growing pains, hopes of home, the gilded laughter curled around our cats, our joy stretched across oceans and train rides.

Like love just… poured from that once-hallowed glass, and now the nectar pools, forgotten, drying where no one kneels to gather it.

But we were almost a decade in. You don’t lose that kind of time without feeling the unseen quakes— jarring bones, jarring memories.

After you slept in someone else’s arms, my body forgot how to seek yours, and yours forgot how to reach. We slept on different floors, in different worlds, each night drifting out to sea, no one left steering us home.

And I felt it— the shift, that slow retreat dressed in quiet like it was mercy. The new rhythms we rehearsed in silence: rising alone, still wondering if you'd notice the empty side of the bed once made for reaching.

But I had already been exiled from the warmth we once shared. So I dressed in hush, cooked as if the eggs might wake you, unsure if sleep still belonged to rest or to avoidance. And I put on my best face— not for you, but for the mirror that no longer reflected us.

I called it tired love— a season we might outlast, the kind of ache people grow through, pray through, wake from still choosing each other.

But you had already gone quiet in the places where love once lived, and I, still faithful, kept watering dead roots— forgetting what it felt like to be chosen, to be missed.

It’s not your leaving that echoes— it’s the staying after you’d already gone. Each “I love you” a ghost you left behind for me to tend.

Our joy didn’t fade; it ruptured. Little landmines buried in European train stations we’ll never return to, series left paused mid-season, unspoken anniversaries. Even the cats don’t curl between us anymore. Even time seems to mourn what we didn’t finish.

Now silence feels crowded. Even absence hums with you.

And no— this wasn’t falling out of love. This was love going mute under the weight of your silence.

I stayed. I reached. I believed. And that is what makes this so goddamn hard to forget.