Between Bruises and Blooms

People say everything happens for a reason.

As if reasons are enough to quiet a heart.

You arrived when I was still learning that survival and living are not the same thing.

I was seventeen.

Sleep felt dangerous.

The walls around me heard too much.

The nights lasted forever.

Then there was your voice, traveling across an ocean, finding me in the dark.

England wasn’t close enough to hold my hand.

But somehow, it was close enough to help me close my eyes.

When you came home, you looked at me like I wasn’t broken.

You listened.

You laughed.

You wanted to know who I was beneath the fear.

And I think…

that terrified me more than anything else.

Because loving someone who is gentle is much harder when you’ve spent your life preparing for storms.

So I left.

Not because you weren’t enough.

Because I didn’t believe I deserved enough.

I chose what was familiar.

Even when familiar hurt.

Years have folded themselves between us.

Different lives.

Different versions of who we became.

Yet somehow, every so often,
your name returns.

Like life itself can’t decide whether we were a beginning or an ending.

People call it the one that got away.

I don’t.

You didn’t get away.

You were simply standing at the wrong chapter of my life.

Sometimes I still wonder…

who we might have been

if we’d met after I learned

that love isn’t supposed to feel like surviving.