Imagine.
Imagine;
Imagine that somewhere, there is a woman.
A woman with scars across her imperfect body and unruly curls falling halfway down her back, refusing, as she always has, to behave.
Maybe she has made more mistakes than she knows how to forgive herself for.
She might have hurt you once or twice.
Imagine that she lied sometimes.
Maybe not about loving you, but about how much.
She might have hidden things because there are truths that feel too much like dynamite in your hands or maybe a comedy reel you can laugh at with your friends.
Imagine that again, she got to see you.
A woman who got to touch you.
Maybe she even got to kiss you.
She might have given herself to you, willingly because she knew the clock was ticking.
Imagine that she struggled to have fear with you.
Maybe she didn’t want to at all.
She knew time was something the two of you were not going to be given.
Imagine that ..
A woman who thought she understood how deeply she felt until she finally stood in front of you and discovered she hadn’t understood it at all.
Maybe she had only known the corners of it.
She might have held back far more than she let on.
Imagine that what you saw in her was a fractured restraint, because she never knew how to lie to you.
Maybe everything she didn’t say was bigger than everything she did.
She might have been terrified that if she opened the door completely, all that feeling would come pouring through and drown you.
Imagine that then she had to leave you.
A woman getting farther and farther away while every part of her was wanting to go in the opposite direction.
Maybe she cried as soon as you couldn’t see her.
She might have discovered that distance is not measured in miles when you love someone.
Imagine that distance can live inside the body.
Maybe it settles inside the bones.
She might have carried the absence of you around like another heart nobody else could see.
Imagine that she knows how insane that sounds.
A woman old enough to know better, sensible enough to recognize the impossibility, and still unable to reason herself out of loving you.
Maybe she tried.
She might have tried harder than you will ever know.
Imagine that she was willing to leave an entire life behind for nothing more certain than the possibility of another one with you.
Maybe she never told you the full extent of that.
She might have known how cruel it would be to place that kind of love in another person’s hands and ask them to accept it.
Imagine that she reached for you anyway, sadly.
A woman who finally spilled her heart to you because the pain became a tidal wave she couldn’t survive and she told you how dark the world had become without you in it.
Maybe afterward you said nothing.
She might have felt ashamed of having shown you the one place in her that had no defense.
Imagine that you had touched something in her soul she had spent her whole life avoiding.
Maybe you found it without even looking.
She might have hated you a little for knowing the way there.
Imagine that loving you forced her to look at things inside herself she never wanted to see.
A woman who could survive almost anything except the knowledge that somewhere in the world existed a person who could reach that deeply inside her and then be gone.
Maybe that scared her a little too real.
She might have realized that maybe you don’t feel the same.
Imagine that absence becomes pain.
Maybe real pain.
She might have woken with it, driven with it, worked with it, slept beside it.
Imagine that eventually she couldn’t keep hurting that much.
A woman who decided the only way to survive missing you was to make you disappear from her heart.
Maybe she then ignored you.
She might have stopped answering.
Imagine that she cut you off.
Maybe she made herself cold.
She might even have let you believe she didn’t care.
Imagine that every unanswered message cost her some truth. Again.
A woman staring at your name and forcing herself not to touch it because she knew exactly what would happen if she did.
Maybe one word from you could undo months of trying to forget.
She might have known she wasn’t strong enough to lose you twice.
Imagine that she swore she would never speak to you again.
Maybe she meant it every single time she said it.
She might have needed to mean it.
Imagine that it wasn’t punishment.
A woman wasn’t trying to teach you a lesson.
Maybe she was trying to stop bleeding from a wound nobody could see.
She might have thought silence would cauterize it.
Imagine that it didn’t.
Maybe nothing did.
She might have learned that you can remove someone from your life without removing them from yourself.
Imagine that years could pass and some part of her would still turn toward you.
A woman who could build walls, change roads, bury memories, and still find you waiting somewhere beneath all of it.
Maybe she hates that.
She might even love it.
Imagine that she still loves you.
Maybe that is the thing she has been trying hardest not to say.
She might love you in the terrible, quiet way you love something you have already accepted you may never have.
Imagine that she doesn’t know what to do with that love anymore.
A woman who doesn’t know whether it was a gift, a wound, a mistake, or the closest thing to truth she has ever touched.
Maybe she doesn’t need you to understand it.
She might not even be asking you to return it.
Imagine that she only needs you to know one thing.
A woman did not walk away because she felt nothing.
Maybe she walked away because she felt everything.
She might have disappeared because she didn’t want to lie anymore.
Imagine how much more terrifying it was to realize that being near you meant she couldn’t tell the truth.
Maybe she chose one permanent grief over another.
She might have been wrong.
Imagine that somewhere,
A woman with scars and unruly hair and too many mistakes behind her.
Maybe with a heart that still beats.
She might wish it didn’t.
Imagine that.
Maybe then you will understand why you won’t see her again.
She loved you enough that being without you hurt parts of her she didn’t know she had.
And she loved you enough that, for a while, the only way she knew how to survive your impact on her-
was to live as though you had never touched her at all.