If I Ever Meet You Again

If I ever have the chance to meet you again, I would turn around and walk away the moment our eyes met.

I would not let you speak. I would not let you smile at me. I would not stay long enough to hear my name in your voice, because I know myself, and I know how quickly everything I have buried would begin clawing its way back to the surface.

One look would be enough.

That is what frightens me.

Not that I would hate you.

That I would still love you.

I think my body would remember you before my mind remembered what you did to me. It would remember the way I once softened around you. The way I looked for you in every room. The way the whole world became background noise whenever your eyes found mine.

And for one terrible second, I would forget that I was never the center of yours.

That was always the wound, wasn’t it?

I made you the center of everything, while I spent our entire love somewhere behind you.

Never quite beside you.

Never quite chosen.

Always close enough to believe I mattered, but never close enough to stop wondering who you might choose if somebody better appeared.

I lived in that uncertainty for so long that eventually it became part of me.

I stopped asking whether I was your first choice because somewhere inside me, I already knew the answer.

Maybe there was somebody else.

Maybe there wasn’t.

Sometimes I think it would have been easier if there had been. At least then I could have given my jealousy a face. I could have hated her hair, her eyes, her voice. I could have pointed at someone and said, There. That is who I lost to.

But I think I was competing with something worse.

Possibility.

The idea that somebody better might come along.

Somebody easier.

Prettier.

Lighter.

Less wounded.

Somebody who did not need to be reassured every time love changed its temperature.

Somebody who would not look at you and feel herself constantly being measured against a woman who had not even arrived yet.

I hated her before she existed.

I compared myself to strangers because any one of them could have become the person who finally made you certain.

And I was never certain.

Not with you.

Even when you were holding me, I could feel the door open somewhere behind your eyes.

Even when you kissed me, I wondered whether there was some part of you still searching.

Even when I slept beside you, I could never shake the feeling that I was only keeping a place warm.

That thought still makes something inside me rot.

How many nights did I lie beside you believing I was home, when perhaps I was only keeping your loneliness company?

How many mornings did I wake beside you and mistake proximity for belonging?

I knew the way you slept.

I knew which side you turned toward.

I knew your breathing.

I knew the weight of your arm across me.

I learned the geography of your body so carefully that I thought knowledge meant permanence.

Maybe I was only keeping your side of the bed warm until somebody arrived who made you stop wondering.

Maybe I was the person between chapters.

The consolation prize.

The temporary home.

The soft place where you could rest until something better called your name.

God, I hate how much that still humiliates me.

Because I tried so hard.

That is the ugliest part.

I tried to become impossible to replace.

I became understanding.

Patient.

Forgiving.

Easy.

I swallowed questions because I was afraid the answers would push you further away. I made excuses for every silence. I renamed distance as exhaustion, indifference as confusion, hesitation as fear.

I made every wound softer in my head because the truth was unbearable.

You were not afraid of love.

You were unsure about me.

And instead of leaving, I made myself smaller.

I thought if I needed less, you might love me more.

If I asked for less, maybe you would stay.

If I became useful enough, gentle enough, necessary enough, maybe one day you would look at me and realize there was nobody else worth searching for.

I wanted to become indispensable because I never believed being loved would be enough to keep someone.

So I listened to everything.

Forgave everything.

Stayed through things that should have been endings.

I became the person you knew would always answer.

And sometimes I wonder whether that was exactly why you never feared losing me.

You knew.

You knew how deeply I loved you.

You knew how terrified I was of your absence.

Maybe my devotion never made me precious.

Maybe it only made me safe to neglect.

There is something degrading about realizing someone treated your love carelessly because they believed it would always be there.

I would have chosen you in every room.

That is what still destroys me.

You never had to compete.

There was no one standing behind you in my mind.

No imaginary person I hoped would be better.

When I loved you, everyone else disappeared.

And I spent our entire relationship wondering when you would do the same for me.

You never did.

So I started competing anyway.

With every beautiful woman.

Every stranger.

Every laugh you enjoyed too much.

Every face your eyes lingered on.

I could always find something in another woman that made me understand why you might prefer her.

She was prettier.

Calmer.

Less complicated.

She did not carry old abandonment into new rooms.

She probably knew how to be loved without constantly expecting it to disappear.

Eventually, you did not need to make me feel second anymore.

I became very good at doing it myself.

That is what you left me with.

I enter love already expecting replacement.

I look at tenderness and wonder how long it will last.

I meet someone and immediately imagine the person they will one day leave me for.

I learned to look at myself through the eyes of departure.

And still, somehow, I miss you.

That is what makes me hate myself most.

After everything, I miss you.

Not constantly anymore.

But deeply.

Quietly.

In places nobody can see.

Sometimes I still remember you with more tenderness than you deserve.

Sometimes I remember your laugh before I remember the silence.

Your hands before the distance.

Your warmth before the cold.

Memory is cruel that way.

It keeps polishing the beautiful parts until you start wondering whether the pain was really as bad as you remember.

It was.

I know it was.

I remember lying beside you and feeling alone.

There is no loneliness quite like that.

To be inches away from the person you love and still feel as if you are begging from outside a locked door.

To hear them breathe beside you while some part of you keeps whispering, Where are you?

I blamed myself for that distance.

Of course I did.

I blamed myself for everything.

Maybe I was too needy.

Too wounded.

Too emotional.

Too available.

Maybe I loved you too openly.

Maybe I should have been harder to reach.

Maybe if I had frightened you with the possibility of losing me, you would have valued me more.

I tortured myself with those questions because it was easier than admitting I could have been perfect and still not have been the person you wanted most.

That truth was unbearable.

Sometimes love does not fail because you loved badly.

Sometimes you are simply not the one they choose.

And there is no dignity in that realization.

Only grief.

If I ever saw you again, I know all of this would return at once.

Every insecurity.

Every question.

Every woman I compared myself to.

Every night I wondered if I was enough.

I would look at your face and immediately want to know if there had been someone after me.

Was she better?

Did you choose her easily?

Did you reassure her without being asked?

Did you close the doors for her that you kept open while you were with me?

Did she sleep beside you without ever feeling temporary?

Did she get the version of you I spent years waiting for?

I think that would be the cruelest thing.

Not discovering that you loved again.

Discovering that you knew how to love someone properly.

Just not me.

Because then I would have to live with the knowledge that I was not asking for too much.

I was simply asking you.

Maybe she never had to beg to feel first.

Maybe you looked at her and knew.

Maybe she never had to compete with possibility.

Maybe she never spent nights staring at your back, wondering whether she was only warming the sheets for somebody you had not met yet.

And I know I should wish you happiness.

I don’t.

Not completely.

There are still parts of me too wounded to be graceful.

Some part of me wants you to remember me.

I want my absence to ache somewhere.

I want you to hear my name and lose your place in whatever life you built after me.

I want someone to laugh like me and make your chest tighten.

I want there to be at least one night when the person beside you is sleeping peacefully and you are staring into the dark, remembering the woman who would have chosen you over everyone.

I want you to know what you lost.

I want it to hurt.

Because I cannot bear the thought that I spent years becoming ruins over someone who walked away untouched.

Maybe that makes me cruel.

I don’t care anymore.

Grief made me selfish.

I want proof that I was more than a placeholder.

More than the waiting room.

More than the warm body beside you while your heart waited for something else.

But perhaps I will never get that proof.

Perhaps that is the ending.

Perhaps you forgot me in the ordinary way people forget things that once mattered.

Perhaps I am just a chapter you remember vaguely while you became the entire language of loss inside me.

Maybe you moved on.

Maybe I only learned how to hide that I didn’t.

So if we ever meet again, I would turn around.

Not because I am healed.

Not because I finally chose myself.

Not because walking away would mean I had won.

There would be no victory in it.

I would leave because I know that if I stayed, I would begin hoping again.

And hope was always the most dangerous thing you gave me.

I would walk away before you could make me believe that maybe this time I could be first.

Before I could start wondering whether the years changed you.

Before one softened look became another promise I invented for you.

I would walk until you could not see me.

And then, somewhere far enough away that you would never know what it cost me, I think I would break.

Not beautifully.

Not quietly.

I would mourn you again like nothing had changed.

I would mourn the person I was with you.

The life I imagined.

The side of the bed I kept warm.

The place in your heart I spent so long trying to earn and never really had.

And I know myself.

I would still turn around.

Even after walking away.

I would look back hoping you had followed me.

Hoping you finally chose me when it was already too late.

And if you were not there—

if all I saw behind me was an empty street, an empty doorway, an empty place where you had been—

I think that would be the cruelest ending of all.

Because after everything,

after all the years,

after all the damage,

after teaching myself to live without you,

some part of me would still be standing there,

waiting to be chosen.

And you would still be gone.