I left you yesterday
with the word goodbye
sitting heavy on my tongue and like something final
I was trying to convience myself to mean.

We were strangers once. Two lives passing quietly.
Then suddenly we weren’t.
We became two people standing a little
too close to the edge of something.
Something I don’t have a name for.

Somewhere between conversations and touches that lingered,
you became someone my mind kept returning to.
And now we are strangers again.
Or something like strangers.
Something worse, maybe—
two people who know just enough about each other
to feel the absence. For me, anyway.

What I feel for you isn’t love.
But it isn’t nothing either.
It lives somewhere in that dangerous
space between curiosity and longing,
between wanting to learn every corner of your
mind and wanting your hands to find their way back to my body.

And I wasn’t finished talking. Not even close.

You said one day
we would have to stop this—
stop the conversations,
stop whatever this is.

Those words have been echoing inside my head
like a song stuck on repeat.
Only they aren’t comforting.
They aren’t beautiful.
They hurt to hear.
They hurt even more to feel.
Still, I respected you. So I said it, knowing eventually you would.
Waiting for that moment felt like being held in captivity.

I said goodbye.
I said we shouldn’t talk anymore.
But when the words left my mouth your face changed.
There was sadness there.
I’m still trying to understand that. Because this was your ending.
This was the future you said was inevitable.
So, why did it look like it hurt you, too?

Still… I can’t just turn this off.
I can’t stop wanting you.
I can’t stop craving your conversations or
the way your touch discovered places no one else ever had.

How am I supposed to forget that?
How am I supposed to listen to stories
about your day when what I really want is to know you —
not the surface of you,
but the deep, quiet part people don’t show everyone.

It leaves an ache in my chest I haven’t felt in so long
I almost forgot what it meant to want someone this much.
There’s a quiet desire to be something more to you than someone you slowly forget.

I know I can’t be.

But no one ever tells you how to explain that to your heart—
how to speak to it while it’s hurting in you chest,
“You have to let this go.”

JMS