#anxiousavoidant

She would receive me the way still water receives light — completely, without resistance.

I would go to the deep place, the place most people never let me take them, and she would follow without hesitation.

And then she would say — Wow.

Just that. One word holding everything she understood and couldn't yet become.

I mistook being received for being chosen. That's where I lost myself — not in her distance, but in her presence. Not in the cold moments, but in the warm ones that promised something neither of us could collect on.

We were both at the cliff. We both wanted to jump.

She just couldn't leave the ground. And I couldn't stop waiting for a day that never came.

We didn't fail each other. We were both just too human for what we were asking of each other.

✦

Some loves don't end because they weren't real. They end because one person couldn't yet become what they genuinely wanted to be.

— original poem | BY Bob