I remembered the first time he held me.
The way his hands fit around mine perfectly,
how his laugh made the world shrink to just us.
The way he whispered my name like it was a secret the universe had entrusted to him alone.
I remembered the quiet afternoons,
our shadows tangled on the couch,
the careless way he kissed my forehead,
the warmth that made me believe forever was possible.
And yet… I remembered the evenings I waited for him to return my attention,
the silent dinners where he laughed with someone else,
the subtle shifting that told me I was less than enough.
I remembered pretending not to notice,
smiling while the truth pressed against my ribs,
and feeling my own worth dissolve in small increments.
I realized, fully, that love had never been enough.
Not kindness. Not warmth. Not whispered words in the dark.
It was never love that kept me.
It was the loop.
The repeating error.
The illusion of devotion, sewn into patterns I had memorized.
I wanted to stay in the memory,
to live in the mornings where he held me,
to replay the afternoons where his eyes were mine alone.
But memory could not protect me from reality.
And reality was cruel, precise, unyielding.
So I stepped back.
Not with rage, not with screaming, not with hate.
Just with the cold, quiet understanding that some errors are designed to repeat.
And some loops—no matter how sweet the memory—are never meant to last.