This is my quiet recognition that you’re leaving. There’s nothing left to reason through, no final plea that might change your mind. You’ve made your choice, and all that’s left for me is to honor it.
This is the surrender to our unraveling—an acknowledgment that the fault line between us grew too wide to mend. The silence between our hearts became a canyon, one I could never span, no matter how I tried.
I understand there’s no going back. No second chance to relive our final night together, to hold onto those last words of love a little longer, or to notice the earliest signs that things were shifting. I don’t get to return to those evenings when you came home carrying unspoken questions in your eyes. That time has passed, and there’s no undoing it.
This is me accepting the ache of your absence. I know I’ll feel it in the stillness of late nights, with a book in one hand and a cup of tea in the other, wondering why the space beside me feels so wide. I’ll see glimpses of you—in windows, in unfamiliar faces, in photographs that pull painfully at memory. You’ll echo through me like a second heartbeat, thudding inside every place you once filled.
Still, life will move forward. One day, love won’t only remind me of you. Someone new will appear—someone who cherishes what you once overlooked, who smiles at things you never found amusing. I’ll wake up beside them in the dawn light and briefly forget you’re not the one curled around me. That brief forgetting will hurt. It will take practice to stand on the edge of what we were and not tumble back in.
I imagine a future now where I marry someone else. That the ring slipped on my finger won’t be from your hands, and the faces smiling at me from the front row won’t be the ones I once tried to call mine. Somehow, I’ll find joy in that new chapter—joy I couldn’t reach with you.
You’ll go on to live fully, deeply, but far from me. I won’t be there to celebrate your milestones or to carry you through your lowest days. Our stories will continue but in separate volumes. One day, you’ll cradle a child, and it won’t be our child. And that will have to be okay.
I see now—we weren’t meant to walk this life together. No matter the love we shared or how fiercely we fought for it, we weren’t the answer to each other’s longings. And so, I wish you wild roads and dreams fulfilled. I hope the path you take leads you everywhere you need to be.
This is me loosening my grip. Not because I want to, but because I must.
This is my farewell. My ache. My love, left behind as a final offering.
This is me releasing you.
