Autopsy of love

You never hit me.

You never screamed.

You only mastered
the art of disappearing
while standing right beside me.

Every time I spoke
what trembled inside my chest,
you answered
with the cruelest language I have ever known—

nothing.

No call.
No message.
No fight.
Just silence.

Silence so heavy
it made me apologize
for needing to be heard.

At first,
I chased you.

I knocked on doors
you had already locked.
I rehearsed apologies
for crimes I didn't commit.
I folded myself
into smaller and smaller versions
of the woman I was,
hoping I could finally become
someone easy to love.

But silence
is a patient executioner.

It doesn't kill you all at once.

It lets you watch
every beautiful thing
bleed out slowly.

The first part of me to die
was certainty.

Then laughter.

Then the reckless way
I used to believe
love could survive anything.

And finally—

the part of me
that reached for you.

You mistook my quiet
for peace.

It wasn't peace.

It was mourning.

Because every time
you walked away
instead of talking to me,
I buried another future
I had imagined with you.

One day,
you came back
expecting to find
the woman who loved you.

She wasn't there.

You had attended
her funeral
a hundred times before.

You just never realized
it was your silence
lowering the coffin.

The saddest part is this:

I didn't stop loving you
because I wanted to.

I stopped
because there was nothing left
inside me
that hadn't already been abandoned.

And now,
when I think of you,

I don't cry.

Not because you meant nothing—

but because
I already cried
every tear
while I was still
trying to love you.