You.

What embarrasses me most isn’t losing you - it’s realising how much energy I wasted trying to make myself palatable enough for your attention. I kept shrinking, softening, sanding down anything that might demand real care, as if being easier to love might coax you into actually doing it. The joke, of course, is that you never even looked closely enough to notice the effort.

You were already halfway gone as I starved on the crumbs you tossed without thinking, convincing myself your indifference was just some saintly test of endurance. I let disappointment blur into devotion, lowered the bar until it scraped the floor, and you still managed to slip under it. You wore your loyalty like cheap perfume - loud and already thinning before it touched skin. And still, I breathed it in, letting scarcity masquerade as intimacy.

For the longest time, I thought what we had was sun-warmed, golden, something eternal, but clarity is unkind in its timing. There was no mutual glow. It was always you, polishing your reflection against any surface you could find, making sure the shine pointed back at only you. You liked being seen, truly seen, but you never did learn how to return the gaze.

And the way you left, if “left” even applies, was almost insulting in its subtlety. You didn’t exit so much as drift, slow as decay, slipping into other rooms and other people with the ease of someone who never intended to plant roots, and I stayed in place, stupidly expectant, waiting for an apology that never sprouted. Waiting for you to notice the space you hollowed out.

I’ve stopped trying to map the outline of your absence, stopped treating the air you vacated like something sacred. There’s nothing holy about someone leaving exactly the way they lived: loud, careless, indifferent - and for that, I suppose, I should thank you. The space feels different now. Peaceful. Honest. Empty in a way that breathes instead of echoes.

I am done mourning what you were never willing to be, so let the sun blister your shoulders. Let the warmth you stole scald its way back to me. I am stepping out of your shadow now, measuring the distance you never cared to hold, and finally feeling the weight lift.