It didn’t break all at once.
It splintered, like ice underfoot,
a soft crack that echoed louder than words.
I saw it in the way your eyes
looked past me,
like I was a window
and not the view.
The silence grew teeth not out of cruelty,
but out of distance we didn’t know how to name.
I kept pretending we were still whole.
Nonetheless, the truth was leaking through the seams.
It was slow and steady, like rain through a roof
we never bothered to fix.
And when I finally said your name,
it sounded like a stranger’s.
That’s when I knew:
we weren’t holding on.
We were haunting.
