The Hour That’s Alters You

We learned love early—

the kind that grows beside you, built from shared streets and futures assumed before choice had language. He loved me with certainty, the way you do when staying feels the same as forever.

For a while, I lived inside that belief. We shared a past like a dialect—inside jokes, familiar rooms, being known before knowing yourself. That history held us longer than it should have. I didn’t leave all at once. I shifted first. Quietly.

Becoming someone the old shape couldn’t hold. He offered continuity. I needed expansion. Neither was wrong. They just didn’t meet without damage.

When he said, “I miss the girl you used to be,” I understood what he meant.

He wasn’t accusing—he was grieving the version of me who fit so easily beside him. That’s when I knew I had already gone too far to return intact. Our towns stayed recognizable—the same plans repeating, the same lives unfolding on schedule. For some, that was home. For me, it felt like circling a beginning. He imagined a future that followed naturally from our past. I could see it clearly—kind, steady, complete—and still feel myself standing outside it.

We never fought. That was the quiet tragedy. No betrayal, no villain to name—just childhood love meeting adulthood at different speeds. I know I hurt him. Not by leaving suddenly, but by changing in a way he couldn’t follow.

That kind of honesty still leaves marks. I carry what he said carefully. Not as guilt, but as proof that I didn’t disappear

I became.

Childhood love teaches you how to begin. Sometimes it also teaches you that becoming means losing the girl someone else was counting on. He stayed near the start. I followed the change already underway.

Not because he wasn’t enough. Because I couldn’t stay who I used to be.