If it had been anyone else,
I'd have turned away without a thought.
Her laugh? That high, unruly kind
That echoed just a note too loud—
Yet I lived to hear it, to pull it from her lips
Like a secret meant only for me.
Her smile was crooked, careless,
The kind a child wears before the world reshapes them—
And still, I chased it,
As though every flash of teeth held meaning,
As though joy could be caught in a glance.
Her jokes were hollow, tasteless things—
Words tossed like pebbles on still water.
But I laughed.
Not because they were funny,
But because she was the one saying them.
Anyone else, I would have turned cold.
Anyone else, I would have walked away.
But it was her.
And so I stayed.
I loved her then.
I love her still.
And I will love her in the quiet hours of tomorrow,
When the world has moved on and I have not.
She is not mine.
She never truly was.
I was happier before love touched me,
Before I drank from the cup and knew the thirst.
But I do not curse the taste,
Even as its absence
Turns every moment
Into a tender kind of ache.