I am trying to loosen my grip
on a person who never agreed to stay
but who I built
a room in my heart for.

You were supposed to be permanent.
Not in the way of vows
or addresses
but in the quieter way,
the way of always,
the way I assumed you
into my future.

I pictured us older.
I pictured phone calls
that started mid sentence
because we already knew.
I pictured rooms
I had not lived in yet
with your voice
somewhere in them.

And now I am standing here
learning that some people
are not destinations,
they are weather,
they move through
and leave the trees different.

Letting go feels like betrayal.
Not of you.
Of the version of me
that swore I never would.
That version is still inside me
with his arms full,
refusing to set anything down,
convinced that loyalty
is measured in how long
you can hold something
that is already gone.

He thinks releasing you
is the same as forgetting you.
He thinks the ache is the proof.
He thinks if he stops hurting
it means he never loved you
enough to begin with.

I am trying to tell him
it is not the same.
I am trying to tell him
that holding on has not brought you back,
it has just kept the wound open
wide enough
for me to keep falling into.

I am trying to tell him
that love can exist without a grip.
That care can survive without contact.
That some people stay real
even when they stop being reachable.

It feels like dying.
I want to be honest about that.
Not the clean kind.
Not the cinematic kind.
The dull slow kind
where something inside you thins out
and you have to keep going anyway.

Making coffee.
Answering texts from other people.
Pretending your chest
is not a room
with the lights off.

The grief is not loud.
It just lives in me now,
rent free,
rearranging the furniture
when I am not looking.

But I am practicing.
Small releases.
An unsent message
deleted instead of saved.
A memory allowed to pass through
without me chasing it down.
A morning where your name arrives
and leaves
without dragging me with it.

I am learning that letting go
is not one moment.
It is a thousand quiet ones.
A practice.
A slow exhale
that takes years to finish.

I thought I knew who I was.
I thought I knew who we were.
No one prepares you
for the loss
caused by a loss
you did not choose.
Not the missing.
The restructuring.
The architecture of a life
built around someone
has to be gently disassembled,
beam by beam,
and I keep finding pieces of you
in walls I did not know
were holding me up.

Still I am trying.
Still I am setting things down.
Still I am whispering
to the version of me who refuses,
you can love them
and loosen your hands,
both,
at the same time.

I am allowed to survive this.
I am allowed
to keep breathing
past the part that feels
like the end.

And maybe one day
the exhale finishes.
Maybe one day
I stand in a room
that does not echo.
Maybe one day
letting go stops feeling like dying
and starts feeling
like the quietest,
most unbearable form of love
I have ever had to give.

house lights

house lights