Almost was not enough

Living in the almost

I am not mourning what was.
I am mourning what never got to be.

The quiet apartment
we never argued in.
The mornings that never existed
but feel like memories anyway.
The version of you
who stayed well,
stayed kind,
stayed long enough
to grow ordinary with me.

I am grieving a man
who only ever lived
in conditional tense.

You would have laughed here.
You would have understood this part.
You would have held me differently,
like you knew where the cracks were
without needing directions.

There was a world
where we learned each other slowly
instead of all at once,
where love did not arrive
wrapped in emergencies,
where neither of us
had to be rescued to be wanted.

In that world
we are gentle.
We are boring.
We survive.

I keep visiting it
like a house that was never built,
walking through rooms
made of air and almost,
touching walls
that disappear under my hands.

In that life
you come home.
In that life
you stay.

In that life
we are not a lesson.

But that future is made of glass.
Beautiful, translucent,
sharp enough to cut
every time I pick it up
to see it in the light.

Because the truth is
I do not know if we would have been happy.
I only know
we would have been something.

And sometimes something
feels harder to bury
than nothing.

So I am not grieving you, exactly.
I am grieving the hope
that one day
there would be a version of you
I could safely love
without losing myself.

I am grieving the girl
who waited for that version
long after she learned
how to live without him.

I am grieving the story
that never got to end properly,
only stopped mid sentence,
pen lifted,
page unfinished.

Some nights
I still reach toward that unwritten ending
like muscle memory.

Not because I want you back.
Not because I regret my life.

But because a door
that never opened
can haunt you
longer than one that slammed shut.

And I think part of me
will always wonder
what color the walls would have been
inside a future
we never got to ruin
or save.

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[Donald Cole]

As you heal through this you will see the past become a reference point. You have a way with words.