Easier this way.

“It’s over.” He said.  Two words. No warning.  You stood in the kitchen with a dish towel still in your hand, and the world spun for a moment. “What? Why? Where is this coming from—“ “I can’t do this anymore.” He cut you off. His voice was flat.  “I feel suffocated being around you. Leave, now.” Five years together. Five years of late-night promises and half-built futures, and he said the words like he was reading a grocery list. “Talk to me. Please. Just tell me what happened.” “There’s nothing to talk about. I’ve made my decision.” His eyes were cold.  They were like glass over a fire that had already gone out, or maybe never existed at all. You didn’t cry. You just nodded. You turned toward the door. Your hand found the handle, and you hesitated, just for a second, waiting for something: a crack in his voice, a flicker of hesitation.  Anything at all. But nothing came. “If I walk out this door,” you said, not turning around, “I’m not coming back.” “Good riddance.” The door clicked shut behind you before the silence could swallow the words. The nights after were the worst.  You lay in bed and reached for the side that stayed empty, and grief crawled into the space where he used to be. The days blurred into each other. You went to work, you ate, you showered, you slept, but none of it felt like living. You moved like something hollowed out. A body walking through a life it no longer recognized. Two months of silence followed. You never checked, texted, or let yourself think his name too loudly. You were proud of that, in the small broken way you were proud of anything those days. Then one evening you gave in. You opened his Instagram with your thumb shaking, bracing for a new person, and a life that had already moved on without you in it. Instead, you found nothing.  Every photo of the two of you had been deleted. Like you’d never happened at all. He hadn’t posted in weeks. Hadn’t been online anywhere else as far as you could tell. You gritted your teeth and told yourself it didn’t matter. Maybe he’d already moved on so completely there was nothing left to post. Perhaps erasing you was just the last cruelty in a long line of them. You closed the app and told yourself you wouldn’t open it again. You almost believed it. But the call came on a Thursday, on your walk home from work. It was an unfamiliar number. You almost let it ring out. You answered anyway. His mother’s voice, thin and breaking, said his name, and then said the words “…passed away,” and the sidewalk seemed to buckle under you. It was cancer.  He’d been fighting it alone for almost a year. In secret.  The doctors had given him less than three months. She said he thought it would be easier for you if you hated him. You wanted to believe her. You wanted to believe that every cold word had been an act of love. That every time he looked at you as though you were a burden, he had been trying to save you from something worse. But he was gone now. And you would never know if that was true. “He called your name at the end. It was the last thing he said before he…” she sniffled.  “He left something for you. A note.” His mother added.  “Please, come for it.” You don’t remember the drive. You only remember the hospital lights, and a nurse’s apology that his body had already been taken down to the morgue.  You remember the way his mother’s hands trembled as she held out a folded piece of paper like it weighed more than either of you could carry. You opened it there in the hallway.  Your eyes caught his handwriting. “Forgive me. It was easier this way. I love you so much. Always has. Always will.” Your heart broke somewhere inside you. A sound you didn’t recognize escaped your lips as you curled around the paper, pulling it close to your chest as if that could make the pain any lesser. No punctuation could hold a sentence like that together.  It just broke, the way you broke, crying there with his handwriting in your hands and five years of forever collapsing into a single piece of paper. You thought you’d already lost him the day he told you it was over. You didn’t know you could lose him twice. And now, there was nothing left to comfort you.  Only the emptiness he left behind. Until next time, dearest reader. ❤️