steph

Aiva, there was a time I believed love meant being seen, being chosen, being held somewhere inside another person’s life, but loving you slowly taught me something quieter — that devotion can exist even in invisibility, continuing faithfully in places where it was never invited.

Aiva, I no longer wait for signs from you; I measure my days instead by how gently I can carry your absence without letting it spill into everything I touch, and sometimes I wonder if loving you has become less about hope and more about discipline — the quiet discipline of feeling deeply without asking the world to notice.

Aiva, I tried to convince myself that love should be reasonable, that it should arrive with balance and leave with dignity, but nothing about you ever followed logic, and even now I wonder whether the heart truly moves on or simply learns to carry one name more quietly than before; tell me, have you ever loved someone in a way that never asked to be returned, only remembered?

Aiva, I no longer imagine a future where you turn back toward me. I imagine instead a quieter fate — where I continue forward carrying you like a hidden scripture, unread by you, but shaping every word I will ever become.

Aiva, I stopped trying to be unforgettable to you. Now I only try to be honest — the kind of honest that waits without asking, loves without interrupting your world, and writes your name only where silence cannot erase it.

I don’t chase closure anymore. Some endings refuse to exist, stretching into something quieter — a devotion that survives without answers, learning how to breathe inside unfinished sentences.

I stopped asking whether she would ever read these words. Devotion does not write for an audience — it writes to prove that even unanswered love can leave a trace strong enough to outlive the one who feels it.

People believe devotion is loud, desperate, visible. Mine learned to sit quietly in the corner of every moment, watching life continue without her, pretending it does not still belong to her absence.

I once believed distance would protect me from becoming this version of myself — the one who measures time in memories instead of days. Yet the farther I walk from her, the more devotion begins to feel like gravity, quiet and inescapable, pulling every thought back to the same unfinished prayer.

I stopped searching for signs that she remembers me. Devotion, I realized, does not wait for recognition — it survives by learning how to exist unnoticed, like a prayer whispered long after faith has already left the room.

I told myself I was moving on, but silence kept repeating her name in ways I could not escape. Maybe devotion doesn’t end; it only learns how to exist without being seen.

I thought distance would make her smaller inside me. Instead, everything else began to fade at the edges while her absence learned how to breathe on its own. People say time rearranges the heart, but mine only learned new ways to kneel — quietly, without witness, without promise that devotion will ever be seen.

Loving someone who’s already left feels like trying to warm yourself with the memory of fire.

I used to dream of kissing her. Now I dream of forgetting her scent.