Distance changed things.
Not all at once—no dramatic absence, no clear ending—but enough to be felt. A missed moment here. A delayed arrival there. Small gaps that shouldn't have mattered, yet did. The kind of gaps the mind rushes to fill when left unattended.
He noticed before he admitted it.
The spaces where she used to be felt louder now, charged with meaning. Silence became a message. Absence became intention. He told himself not to read into it, but the thought arrived anyway, persistent and sharp: something is different.
And different meant unstable.
He reviewed his behavior carefully, retracing steps as if looking for an error in calculation. He had been patient. Respectful. Invisible when necessary. If distance existed now, it couldn't be because of him. That logic settled easily—too easily.
So the explanation had to be external.
Maybe she was distracted. Maybe someone else had taken up space he believed was neutral, unclaimed. The idea unsettled him more than he expected, sending a ripple of irritation through his thoughts. Not anger—no, that would imply loss of control—but a sense of imbalance, like a familiar room rearranged without permission.
He told himself distance was temporary. Everything fluctuated.
Still, he adjusted.
He listened more closely when her name came up. Watched reactions. Interpreted tone. Every scrap of information felt valuable now, a way to measure how far she had moved from the version of her he held so carefully in his mind.
What troubled him most was how personal it felt.
Her distance wasn't just absence—it felt like rejection, even though she had never offered him anything to refuse. That contradiction gnawed at him, forcing his thoughts into tighter circles. How could he feel denied when nothing had been promised?
The question irritated him. He pushed it aside.
He began to imagine explanations that painted him as patient, wronged, overlooked. Stories where his silence was mistaken for indifference, his restraint for