I loved you
until I didn’t
until I couldn’t.

There’s a difference.

One is a quiet dimming,
like a room at dusk.
The other
is a circuit breaking;
sparks, smoke,
the unmistakable smell
of something inside me
burning out.

Loving you meant
learning to disappear
in plain sight.

It meant
hating myself
in small, socially acceptable ways
the kind no one applauds,
but no one interrupts either.

Loving you was
a slow undoing.

Thread by thread,
I unraveled,
not because I was fragile,
but because I kept handing you
the loose ends.

Loving you meant
ignoring what I knew.

And I knew.

I knew in the pauses,
in the almosts,
in the way love never quite
landed on me,
just hovered,
performative,
convincing enough
to keep me hoping.

Loving you made me
a fool
in the most dangerous way,
not because I didn’t know better,
but because I did
and stayed anyway.

There’s a particular grief
in betraying yourself
with full awareness.

Loving you
didn’t lift me.

It pressed
steady, insistent
until joy felt like effort
and light felt borrowed.

I became smaller
to make sense of you.

Quieter
to accommodate you.

Less
so you could remain
unchallenged
in your version of love
that required nothing
but took everything.

Loving you
left shards.

Not the dramatic kind
no visible wreckage,
no cinematic collapse.

Just fragments
embedded,
invisible,
waiting to catch
on ordinary moments
and remind me
where I broke.

You wouldn’t call it
narcissism.

Of course not.

You would call it
misunderstanding,
timing,
complexity.

But I learned
what it feels like
to love someone
who does not
and perhaps cannot
love back
in any way
that sustains a soul.

Loving you
was heavy.

Not passionate-heavy,
not the weight of something meaningful.

Just
baggage.

Accumulated, unexamined,
handed to me
as if I had signed up
to carry it.

And I did.

Until I didn’t.

Until I saw
how low I had traveled
to remain with you.

How belief in you
required
the erosion
of belief in myself.

That was the moment.

Not loud.
Not dramatic.

Just a quiet,
irreversible knowing:

I could not love you
and survive myself.

So I stopped.

Not because you changed.

But because
finally
I did.