Bookmark, Not The End

i used to think endings

were loud things..

doors slamming, voices raised,

storms ripping roofs from houses

but ours

was quiet

like someone pressed pause

in the middle of a game

and set the controller down

without saying when they’d be back

and the screen is still glowing

our characters still standing there

mid breath

mid story

mid us

three weeks

five hundred hours

thousands of minutes

a million seconds

long enough

to meet myself again

because truthfully

some of the silence between us

was me

i was the quiet

i was the distance

i was the words i never said

the reassurance i never gave

the moments i should’ve listened

and i see that now

not because you told me

but because i finally stopped running

from my own reflection

these weeks

i danced in the shower

sang off key

painted color back into my hands

built tiny worlds in games

wrote stories

played music too loud

and somewhere between all of that

i found her

the girl in the mirror

i see my hair growing

my eyebrows forming

my eyes,

and i love them

i see my lips

my soft jawline

my freckles

my skin

and i don’t see perfection

i see me

maybe i’m not where younger me

thought i’d be by now

no mansion

no million dollars

no plot of land

no perfect life plan

but i have something real

i have my friends

my small but great family

my two tiny souls with paws

and a heart that still knows how to love

and loving you

never felt like losing myself

it felt like sharing oxygen

you said you were at the end of your rope

holding on by a thread

and i understand now

why you were tired

i just wish

i had known sooner

how to hold it with you

because i would have

what we had

was never fake

never careless

never empty

we were never enemies

just two people

who didn’t always know

how to love out loud

i’m not scared of losing the past

memories don’t disappear

they settle into your bones

and stay there

what i’m scared of

is losing the chance

to build something even stronger

with the same hands

that already know mine

i don’t believe our story ended

i think

someone folded the page corner, maybe even put in a book mark..

maybe we can open it now

turn the page together

and start with a fresh

pearly white page

looking back in the book

there might be burnt pages

but turning forward

doesn’t mean forgetting

it means the story mattered enough to keep

that nothing we lived was wasted

it was building us

and it means

we don’t erase what we were

we carry it

into what we could still become