Aftertaste

I was excited to explore you.


Not to claim you.


Not to fix you.


To move through you slowly,


like a place you don’t want to misread.

.............

I paid attention.


To the way your voice softened when you felt chosen,


to the pauses you left like open doors.


I thought learning you


meant you were real.

.............

You felt like a priority once.


Important in the way breathing feels—


automatic, unquestioned,


until something tightens.

.............

And then—somewhere—


without warning,


without a scene to circle back to—


the temperature changed.

.............

You were still there,


but no longer with me.


Present the way actors are present—


hitting their marks,


after forgetting the script.

.............

I didn’t accuse.


I adapted.


I told myself this was another room


we hadn’t learned how to stand in yet.

.............

Only later did I understand:


you weren’t changing.


You were stopping.

.............

The version of you I knew


had been effort.

A holding pattern. 


A performance sustained


by wanting to be wanted.

.............

And when that want ran out,


so did you.

.............

There is no villain here.


Just the unbearable realization


that I loved someone


who could only exist


while they were being witnessed.

.............

You didn’t betray me loudly.


You simply removed the mask


and let gravity do the rest.

.............

Now I’m left grieving two people:


who you were with me, 


and who I was

when I believed that was real.

.............

That’s the disbelief of it—

not deception,

not malice—

but discovering that intimacy

was conditional,

and I was the condition.

.............

I don’t hate you.


That’s the most unforgivable part.

.............

If there had been cruelty,


I could have named it.


If there had been violence,


I could have burned it out of me.

.............

But there was only absence—


the disciplined withdrawal


of someone already gone


in every way that mattered.

.............

I wish I could be angrier.


I wish there was a crime


large enough to justify


the size of this grief.

.............

Instead, I carry a rage


with no permission—


an unsent letter,


heavy in my hands,


with nowhere to land.

.............

You didn’t destroy me.


You just stopped choosing me.


And somehow,


that was enough


to collapse the future


I was standing in.

.............

That’s the bitterness of it—


not that you wore a mask,


but that I loved the face it made,


and would have mourned it properly


if it had died


instead of walking away.

.............

So I move forward


not healed,


not forgiving,


but aware—


that some endings don’t give you


the dignity of a fight.

.............

They leave you


with the lifelong aftertaste


of wanting one.