~~~


He left because he loved her too much...


Not in the sweet, poetic way people dream of... But in the aching, flawed way, that made him feel like a weight tied to her wings.


He’d seen it in her eyes, even when she tried to hide it.

The way she dimmed herself to meet him in his shadows.

The way her light flickered when he crumbled...


And he couldn’t stand it. The idea that him staying, might mean breaking her.


So he left...

Before she could ask him to...

Before the love turned too heavy to bear...

Before she stopped smiling when he walked into the room...


He wrote the letter with shaking hands, each word tearing something out of him.


He never expected peace.

But he hoped... Naively, maybe... That she would find hers.


~~~


In the silence that followed, he listened for her too...


He played the same songs.

He whispered her name to the wind when no one was around.

He tried to drown himself in empty bottles, in the world, in the crowds, in the noise and the silence...

But her memory always rose above it all...


She was in the golden hour light...

In the scent of rain...

In the way his chest still ached every time he passed a willow tree...


And even as he wandered, he never stopped loving her.


But he stayed gone.


Because that was the one thing, he could do right by her.


~~~


He kept moving from town to town, never staying long enough for roots...

Because every root, reminded him of the one he had pulled from her life.


People came and went...

Some were kind...

Some tried to reach him...


But none of them knew how to hold the part of him that still belonged to her.


He wrote letters he never sent...

He sketched her from memory...

Her laugh lines, the tilt of her head when she was thinking, her bright full of kindness eyes...

He kept a small photograph of them, creased and worn, tucked between the pages of a book he couldn’t finish...


~~~


He wondered... Often, and in quiet, if she hated him.

If she resented his absence, more than she ever cherished his presence.


But more than that, he wondered if she was happy.


If the love they had left her stronger, or broken in ways he could never see...


And every now and then... When the ache swelled too large for silence, he’d sit by some nameless tree in some forgotten place, look up at the sky, and whisper to the stars...


"I hope she’s found what I couldn't give her..."


Because he never stopped believing that she deserved more than him.

And he never stopped hoping that somehow, in all her healing, she would still remember that once... They had loved each other, like it meant something...


Even if it couldn’t last...