Part II: Fourteen Days

...Then I left for two weeks.

Just fourteen days,
yet when I returned,
it felt as though we had been erased
from the spaces we once occupied.

The laughter came slower,
the conversations thinner,
the warmth replaced by something distant
neither of us would name.

I kept searching for us
in familiar places,
but the city that had introduced us
could no longer bring us back.