I kept inventing softer versions of the truth,
threading excuses through the cracks in your voice,
pretending the distance was a phase
and not the shape you carved into every room we shared.
I said your quiet wasn’t dismissal, just fatigue,
the weight of your day bending your posture,
not the fading of interest you no longer bothered to disguise.
I told myself your rare sweetness meant more than the cold stretches between—
that warmth glimpsed once a month could anchor a future
built on frayed rope and wishful thinking.
When you pulled away during arguments,
staring past me as if cataloging exits,
I claimed you needed space, air—
anything but the simple fact
that I’d lost your attention long before I noticed.
I dressed your inconsistency as mystery,
convinced myself that complexity lived where apathy nested,
refusing to admit that wanting someone doesn’t make them heavy.
Our bed felt crowded with doubts you never named,
but I still traced patterns in your silence,
calling them love letters written in negative space.
On nights you left me mid-conversation,
eyes drifting toward some unseen horizon,
I whispered that you were dreaming big
and not dreaming elsewhere.
I rewrote every moment you didn’t choose me
into a scene where timing was cruel
and not you.
I clung to fragments—your hand brushing mine,
a rare laugh, that soft look once under streetlights—
as if they outweighed the way you flinched
when commitment’s shadow crossed your face.
I memorized the lies I made myself swallow:
that I was enough, that you were trying,
that our fracture was temporary
and not the natural state we lived in.
But truth crawled out from the corners eventually,
dragging its claws across the stories I stitched
to keep myself from shaking apart.
I woke one morning and felt the hollowness you left behind—
clean, quiet, almost elegant in its finality—
and knew that I’d been loving a mirage
I built to spare myself the bruise of recognition.
Still, part of me lingers in that fiction,
wandering the corridors of an imagined us,
gathering the dust of what never really existed.
And though I hate the weight of it, I admit
the sharpest pain comes from knowing
I lied to myself more skillfully than you ever did.
I called your silence patience, your distance something kind,
I painted every absence as a record redefined.
But truth kept scratching at the doorway that I locked inside—
what I told myself it was was just a way to stay blind.