When the love went,
it was made of little deaths,
most silent,
or swept under the IKEA rugs
we always ended up binning a few weeks later.
It was not some pivotal moment.
It didn’t happen when you wouldn’t make the call,
or when you referred to me as 'you know who'
in that message I should never have read.
It didn’t happen when I went for the walk
that was ours—
alone.
It happened in between all these tiny moments,
slowly slipping away,
and I let it fall.
Sometimes I tried to gather those pieces back,
find them behind furniture,
in empty promises of change,
in makeup sex after arguments.
But the pieces were always smaller than I remembered,
and never quite fit back together right.
Time flowed on
as hurts turned to habits,
and the things that once made us pause and reflect
became as normal
as going to bed
but never saying goodnight anymore.
And then, one morning, I realized—
check-out had been at 9,
but I’d stayed till 12.
And for every morning after that,
I paid the fine for staying late.
Those fines became lines that stretched across my skin,
and I became too tired to face
what would come next
if we stopped waking up each morning
pretending this was for the best.
Pretending that we couldn’t feel
the bones of what was left,
slowly crumbling beneath us
as we walked barefoot
across the almost ashes.
No, the love didn’t go suddenly.
It was made of little deaths—
so small,
we never saw them coming.
