it's time to go

when words start to go stale

I’ve always been a woman of my word, but the essence of you has never failed to make me bite my tongue. A broken record plays inside my brain, singing verses of letting go, while my pen composes sonnets of love. There’s been many men I keep locked behind bars, yet you’re the only one who slips through the cracks. I wrote of the one who made me swoon in the city then put him on a shelf. I wrote of the one who stumbled in during the summer and tucked him quietly in a box. But each time I flip the page, the same story emerges—the one I’ll always see as my greatest loss.

This is the last time I’ll ever write about you.

I’ve painted the color of your eyes across every canvas I could find. I’ve knitted the softness of your touch into sweaters I will never wear. I’ve exposed my bruises to strangers and let my pain become a strange kind of honesty.

I’ve carried the weight of you in quiet moments and poured wine over letters I will never send. I’ve traced the memory of your hands on my skin, and I’ve whispered your name into empty rooms, hoping it would vanish into something lighter. I have walked the streets alone, feeling the echo of your footsteps behind me even when no one follows. I’ve measured my heart in the spaces between your absence, learning the contours of loss with every breath. I have asked myself how love can be so deep and yet so fleeting, how someone can exist in you so entirely and yet leave so quietly. But in the quiet aftermath, I feel the stubborn pulse of my own heart, still alive, still stubbornly mine.

Despite all this, I keep finding traces of you in the corners of my life. In the smell of rain on concrete, in the way sunlight hits the edge of a window, and in the hush between one heartbeat and the next. I catch myself smiling at shadows, as if you could still slip back into them. As if the universe might bend enough for one more taste of you.

But I have learned that love does not always linger in presence; sometimes it lingers in absence, in memory, and in the quiet ache of recognition. I have loved you across time and across silence—and in that love, I have become both richer and more fragile.

So here I stand at the edge of everything we once were, and I know it’s time to go. Not with bitterness or fury, but with the kind of gentle grace that only comes when the heart has been tenderized by its own longing. I fold the fragments of us into the smallest corners of myself, and I promise to carry only the virtue, not the weight. Because love is not about possession, insistence, or the stubborn hope that things could be different. Sometimes, love is about letting go.

And letting go is sometimes more noble than fighting.