Too Much, Not Enough

I have learned to hold my breath in love,
to keep my hands open, palms skyward,
so no one mistakes my longing for possession.
I swore I would not ask for what cannot be given,
but here I am, choking on the silence
of what was never spoken.

A case of misdirection, really.
A puzzle with all the pieces scattered in plain sight,
and me, the fool,
thinking if I squint hard enough,
I could force a different picture to appear.
But the truth, as it turns out, was never hiding.

Is it betrayal if she was always in the story?
If her name sat somewhere in the prologue,
half-lit, half-dismissed,
waiting for me to stumble across it?
I was told she’d fade,
that she was just a habit you hadn’t yet broken,
but some ghosts are comfortable, aren’t they?
Some ghosts, you don’t want to exorcise.

So here I am, retracing my steps,
measuring the weight of your absences,
doing the math of your missing time.

When you don’t streak.
When you say you’re out with Kay.
When my messages gather dust in your inbox,
their echoes swallowed by a silence
that already has its answer.

On nights like these,
I do not ask where you are.
I do not ask at all.
But I grieve the knowing.

I weigh the silence like a currency I’ll never be rich in,
trace the outline of absence like a detective
who already knows where the body is buried.

The numbers add up, don’t they?
The pattern is obvious. The answer, inevitable.
And yet somehow, I am still standing here,
staring at the evidence,
pretending I don’t know how the story ends.

But does she?
Does she sit with the same questions,
or does she live in the peace of never needing to?
Does she feel secure in her place,
or does she also measure the time,
wondering if I exist too?

Does she get the same version of you?
Do you geek out about the things you love to her too?
Do you look at her like you look at me,
when I get all excited and yap about things?
Do we have anything that is ours,
or do you pour the same sweetness, the same closeness,
into every woman who meets your hands?

Then tell me—
Why are you so tender with me?
What is all this passion?
What are these conversations that stretch till dawn?
What is this thoughtfulness, this remembering,
this careful way you treat me,
like I am something worth keeping?

If I am nothing more than convenience,
why dress it up in tenderness?
Why call it by a name it does not deserve?

Oh, my heart.

I do not chase.
I do not beg.
I do not ask for what love will not offer freely.
But I feel the weight of knowing
that I am being tested like a theory,
watched like a possibility—
something that could be, but never quite is.

And yet, I still ask:
Why did it have to be this?
Why did it have to be me?
Why did it have to be her?

I don’t know how to unhear what I’ve heard,
how to unsee the shape of uncertainty
before it even calls itself by name.

I have been here before.
I have been the afterthought,
the inconvenience,
the weight too heavy to carry.
I have been the child left behind,
the woman who loved too loudly,
the fool who thought if she hurt quietly enough,
someone would decide to stay.

And you—
with your fleeting touch,
your hunger that lingers long with no meaning,
your choices, precise as a blade, careless as a wound—
you have made a mockery out of me.

I am a ghost in my own story, once again.

I do not want to be angry.
I do not want to be jealous.
I do not want to feel like I am fighting
for dignity in a love that was meant to be soft.

But tell me, did I not make this easy?
Did I not carve out a home in my chest for you,
with no locks, no chains?
Did I not say, do what you will, just do not shame me?

And yet, here we are.

The game is over.
The clues were there.
The conclusion writes itself.

But tell me, love,
Was the mystery at least entertaining?

I have spent years unlearning the ache of being
too much and not enough,
of loving like a flood but receiving in teaspoons,
of being an open road and watching the ones I love
find dead ends in me.

And now you—
with your reckless hands,
your want that does not consider consequences—
you have made my fears real.

I am not angry, not yet.

First, I am small.
First, I am invisible.
First, I am the question I prayed I’d never ask—
"What did I lack?"