She Never

She laughed like gravity didn’t apply,

like the weight of the world bent around her jokes.

First time I saw her,

she was arguing with a vending machine

like it owed her something deeper than snacks.

She told me love is quiet,

not in volume,

but in the way it rearranges your furniture

without asking.

We sat under fluorescent moons,

cheap bar lights with soul,

plastic cups filled with confessions

disguised as tequila.

She’d trace circles on her wrist

when she got nervous,

like she was trying to remember

what skin felt like

before scars became punctuation.

I told her I used to believe in signs.

She said, “That’s cute.”

But her eyes…

they didn’t blink when she said it.

Like she meant every shade

she didn’t name.

And that was the turn,

not dramatic, not cinematic,

just a Tuesday where she stopped returning texts

and started sending silence instead.

I kept dreaming in color

while she painted everything grayscale,

like she couldn’t trust crimson anymore,

like anything warm meant caution,

like anything blooming

had to be a trap.

She loved in parentheses,

never at the center,

always a whisper on the rim of the sentence,

a conditional clause,

something soft and easily erased.

I stayed.

Stupidly.

The way people stay

at a train station long after the last train.

But don’t get it wrong,

she was brilliant.

Not in the sparkle way,

but in the flare-up-in-your-chest kind of way.

Like something ancient remembered

what it was to ache.

We were impossible

in the most believable way.

Like a song you only hear

when no one else is around.

And maybe love was red,

sure.

But she saw everything

in a different kind of vivid.

Not less.

Just…

other.