Spark?
I think the cruelest part of love is that it doesn’t always leave all at once.
Sometimes it stays. Not in the way people write about in novels, but in smaller ways. In the habit of reaching for your phone before remembering there is no one waiting on the other side. In setting two cups on the kitchen counter before quietly putting one back.
In hearing your name where no one actually said it.
Love is patient enough to haunt ordinary things.
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I have replayed our last conversation so many times that I’ve started memorizing the silences. The pauses between our words feel louder than the words themselves. Maybe that’s where everything fell apart not in what we said, but in everything we were too afraid to admit. I wonder if you still think of me when the room is quiet. Not because you miss me. But because some people leave echoes instead of footprints.
I was never afraid of losing you.
I was afraid of becoming the reason you had to leave.
There’s a difference.
One is heartbreak.
The other is guilt.
And guilt has a way of surviving long after love has learned how to let go.
If you ever come back, I won’t ask you to forget who I used to be. I’ll only ask you to notice who I’ve been trying to become ever since you left. Because sometimes a spark isn’t the beginning of a fire.
Sometimes it’s the last small light that refuses to disappear, waiting for someone to believe that even ashes can remember how to burn.
