reduced.

The breakup was almost the easy part.

It was not the leaving.
It was what came after.
The slow, ugly unknowing.
The way you started talking to me
like I was a place you used to pass through
but never lived in.

My favorite color, for one.
Which is crazy,
because we planned a whole house around things we could not touch.
Wall murals.
Nursery themes.
Which rooms should feel quiet.
Which should feel alive.
We built a future in contraband detail
and you still lost it.

Kitchen.
Our bedroom.
Nursery.
What color would feel calm.
What color would feel like us.
What color a little girl should wake up to.
Now you ask me things
like our life never made it past smoke.

You forgot I wanted kids.
Forgot we talked about girls.
Forgot we talked about who would carry.
Forgot that whole trembling little galaxy
we kept building with our mouths
like speaking it enough times
might make it hold.

You forgot date nights too.
The projector in the yard someday.
Family bonfires.
Our movie nights.
The tiny ordinary rituals
that were supposed to make a life feel real.
It is obscene, actually,
how specific we were.
How far we let ourselves go.
How a person can stand in the blueprint of a future
and later act like they never saw a single wall.

You forgot how long we were together.
Or maybe forgot is too soft of a word.
You cut it down.
Reduced it.
Made it smaller in your mouth.
Like time is something you can shave off
without drawing blood.
Like I was only there for half the storms.
Half the nights.
Half the loving.

You forgot my bad handwriting, too.
Which is almost laughable
until it isn’t.
Because ugly handwriting
is the kind of thing love should know.
The slant of it.
The rush of it.
The way my letters look like they are staging an escape.
That is not trivia.
That is texture.
That is proof that somebody once held the small, stupid details of you,
and did not think they were stupid at all.

You forgot I like Cthulhu.
Which sounds small
until you realize it isn’t.
It is one of those odd little corners
people only learn
when they stay long enough
to see what lives in the dark.
You used to know my weirdness by shape.
Now even my monsters are strangers to you.

And still, somehow,
you remembered the panic attacks.

Of course you did.

You remembered the worst version of me
like it was the truest one.
Like I was all alarm.
All siren.
All shaking hands and disaster.
You’ve kept the wreckage catalogued
but are blind to the year I’ve spent learning
how not to disappear inside of it.

You ignore the work.
Ignore the coping.
You’re blind to the way I taught my body
to come back down from the ledge.
You ignore that I’ve gotten better.
Ignore that I am trying.
Forget I am not who I was
when fear was driving everything with both hands.

That is what stays under my skin.
Not that you loved me and stopped.
Not even that there’s someone else.

It is the replacement of it.
The way all the good files got overwritten.
The way the new relationship moved in
and suddenly there’s no furniture left from us.
No trace of the rooms we built.
No ash.
No outline on the carpet.
Just me, standing outside my own life,
watching the windows go dark one by one.

We used to say
love you to the moon and Saturn.

Not just the moon.
Saturn too.
Because we were greedy with tenderness.
Because the moon was not far enough.
Because love sounded more convincing
when it had one more planet in it.

I think about that all the time now.
Those words still floating somewhere, maybe.
Dead signal.
Broken orbit.
A satellite with both our fingerprints on it
circling a planet that no longer answers.

That is the haunted part.
Not that it ended.
Not even that it hurt.

It is that I am still out here,
burning in the same place,
and you look up
like you’ve never seen this sky before.

Like we did not once map it together.
Like you did not once swear
you knew exactly where to find me.

And maybe that’s what heartbreak really is.
Not being left.
Not being unloved.

Being remembered wrong.

Being reduced to your damage.
Being emptied of your own evidence.
Being turned into a cautionary story
by someone who once planned a nursery with you
and said “love you to the moon and saturn”
like they meant every mile of it.

The breakup did not hurt me.

It was hearing you speak about me
like a person you almost knew.

It was watching myself become
a glitch in history
I thought had already been written in permanent ink.

It was learning that some people
do not lose you all at once.

They keep the bruise.
They throw out the stars.