Between Bruises and Blooms

Some people become memories.

You became a question.

Not because we never touched,
or because we never loved,
but because life kept interrupting us
before either of us could find out
what we might have been.

When you were across an ocean,
I learned the sound of safety
through a computer speaker.

You stayed awake
until I wasn’t afraid anymore.

I fell asleep to your voice
because for a little while,
the monsters outside my bedroom
couldn’t reach me.

Then you came home.

For a handful of nights,
the world finally shrank
to conversations after midnight,
quiet roads,
and the feeling that someone
was looking at me
instead of looking through me.

You wanted me,
not just my body,
but the girl hidden underneath
the survival.

Then survival won anyway.

I left.

Not because I stopped choosing you.

Because sometimes
the safest-looking door
isn’t the right one—
it’s just the only one
you believe you can reach.

Years have passed
like chapters written by strangers.

Different cities.
Different lives.
Different heartbreaks.

Sometimes months.
Sometimes years.

And then…

there you are again.

A message.

A joke.

A name lighting up my screen
like no time has passed at all.

You once told me
I felt like unfinished business.

I smiled when I read it.

Because I never told you
I’ve wondered
if maybe that’s exactly what you are too.

Not the love of my life.

Not the one that got away.

But the life
that always seems to circle back,
asking the same quiet question:

“What if?”

I don’t know
whether we were ever meant to be.

Maybe we only existed
to remind each other
that kindness can arrive
at exactly the moment
someone is forgetting
they deserve it.

Maybe our story
was always meant to remain
a conversation
that never quite found its ending.

Or maybe…

some stories
aren’t unfinished because they failed.

Maybe they’re unfinished
because somewhere,
without either of us realizing it,

we’re still writing them.