Object Permanence

I was the bright thing.

The new tab left open.

The song on repeat at 3 a.m.

I was everything all at once.

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

You learned my face the way fire learns oxygen—

hungrily, beautifully, without restraint.

I was studied, adored, consumed.

Your questions came fast,

your love faster.

You made me feel like I was chosen by lightning.

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

I didn't know then

that lightning does not stay.

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

At first, I mistook intensity for devotion.

Mistook urgency for safety.

I let myself bloom under your attention,

because who wouldn't grow

in a constant sun?

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

But focus is a moving thing.

It shifts.

It slips.

And one day I noticed

I was no longer being held—

just remembered.

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

Your messages slowed.

Your eyes wandered past me

to something shinier, louder, newer.

I became background noise

to a mind chasing the next spark.

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

You didn't leave in a way

that could be grieved.

You vanished mid-sentence.

Mid-promise.

Mid-love.

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

No fight.

No ending.

Just absence.

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

And that is the cruelest part—

not that you stopped loving,

but that you stopped noticing.

As if I had been set down somewhere

and forgotten.

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

I searched myself for what I'd done wrong.

I replayed the beginning like evidence:

You said I was everything.

You said you'd never felt this way.

You said—

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

But a mind left untended,

can turn people into orbiting bodies—

intense gravity, no landing gear.

Connection without continuity.

Love without object permanence.

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

And if you don't know that—

if you aren't taught that—

you blame yourself

for being dropped.

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

The trauma isn't the fading.

It's the confusion.

The whiplash between worship and neglect.

The way your nervous system learns

that closeness means disappearance.

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

I am still unlearning the habit

of bracing for abandonment

the moment I am adored.

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

Still unlearning the fear

that being loved intensely

means being left quietly.

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

I don't hate you.

I know your brain is a house

with too many doors

and no map.

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

But I wish you had learned

how to hold someone

before you held me.

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

Because being someone's hyper-focus

feels like destiny—

until it feels like erasure.

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

And it is a lonely thing

to be loved like a miracle

and then forgotten

like a thought

your mind never came back to finish.