I once believed the ones who leave
would circle back someday,
as if the heart were only a door,
and doors, by nature, forgive.

I kept a quiet corner open,
a small, stubborn light
that refused to learn the language
of “never again.”

But you did not simply go.
You gifted me a distance
that does not shorten with seasons,
a silence that chose
the shape of a lifetime.

So I lived—
not as I imagined living,
but as one learns to:
carrying your absence
like a second heartbeat.

I have spent my years
measuring ordinary days
against an extraordinary feeling,
and finding the world
both loud and insufficient.

Because you, somehow,
are not a person I can place in the past,
but an emotion I keep sacred—
tucked away where time cannot reach,
where memory needs no permission.

And this journey…
this reality…
it is harsh in the way stone is harsh—
it does not bend,
it does not explain.

Yet still, I walk.
With the door no longer waiting,
with the heart learning new weather,
with your name quietly folded
into the rhythm of my breath—

not as a hope of return,
but as proof
that I once loved something
too real to disappear.

“Some sunsets are forever—once they slip beyond the horizon, they never rise again. Some separations are like that: beautiful, final, and lasting a lifetime.”