Burning

There was something about her, he can't remember, though he's so sure it's the same damn thing that made him, his heart, to surrender.

There was a time where they shared the same exact thoughts, shared the same exact feelings, of love reciprocating.

They were married, in his head.

They were happy, they had children, they even had a puppy, just the way they wanted it to be.

He recalled how they met, how she looked stunningly beautiful at first glance, and then the second, sublime. He could swear he'd die at the third.

He's just there, sitting. On a bench, a random, not that relevant, bench. But it's special, it's where he first saw her.

It's somewhere he goes when he needs to remember her face. Where in reality, he never really forgot, everything. The first time they met, how they were inseparable, how things went horrible, how everything they had worked for crumbled.

Now he can only reminisce, he can only think of her, of them together.

What they had once.

They don't have now.

And all of it, can only be replayed, in his head.

The cruelest thing about grief is how it keeps the door open. How it lets you walk back in, every single time, just to remind you that the house is empty now.

He wonders if she ever sits somewhere the way he does. If there's a bench, a corner, a quiet patch of the world that holds her the way this one holds him, gently, uselessly, something you cradle that's already broken.

He doubts it.

That was always the difference between them.

He kept everything. She traveled light.

The leaves have changed since the last time she sat beside him here. Seasons moved on the way she did, without asking, without apology, without once looking back to see what they were leaving behind. He stayed. He always stayed. That was his fatal flaw, he thought. That loving her felt less like a choice and more like a condition. Like breathing. Like the way the chest just keeps going even when you've given it every reason to stop.

He closes his eyes and she's there immediately.

She always is.

Laughing at something he said that wasn't even that funny. Head tilted, nose scrunched, the sound of it catching him off guard the way it always did, like hearing a song for the first time and knowing instantly you'll never get it out of your head.

He would give anything to hear it one more time.

Even the silence after.

Even the part where she stops and looks at him like he's something ordinary. Like he's furniture she's grown used to. Like he's always just there.

He was always just there.

And now he's here. Still. Alone on the same bench where it all began, replaying a story she's long since forgotten, in a theater built for one, for the one man who can't, who doesn't want to be moved.

How her lips taste, how it's easy to love her that's as easy breathing, how her mole looked at the side of her lips, the shape of her face when she smiled, when she cried.

The last thing they ever talked about, he can't remember.

But God, he remembers everything else.

Karina, Oh Karina, it burns.

How, just how can I? Do you think I have forgotten about you?

How will I ever have the ability to look for someone that's not you, if you had made me feel every little thing that's as irreplaceable as you?

Where were you when I needed you most?

It rang, and rang, and rang in his ears.

A question with no one left to answer it.

That was the thing about loving Karina, she filled every room she walked into, and when she left, she took the walls with her. He wasn't left with emptiness. He was left with ruin. And there is a difference. Emptiness is bearable. Emptiness is just space. Ruin is what remains when something was there, when something mattered, when you had already started calling it home.

He had called her home.

Stupid, he thinks. Stupid, stupid, stupid. To have loved someone so completely that your chest now feels like a city after a storm, still standing, barely, but nothing where it used to be.

He tries, sometimes. To look at other people the way he looked at her. To let someone else's laughter be enough. To sit across from a warm face and think, Maybe. Maybe this time.

But then she surfaces. She was always there.

like someone tucks their hair behind their ear. In the quiet between songs. In the smell of coffee at 2am, which was always theirs, late nights, whispered conversations, her saying tell me something nobody else knows about you like she was collecting pieces of him, like she actually intended to stay.

And he had told her everything.

Every single thing.

That is perhaps what breaks him most. Not that she left. But that she left knowing him. Fully. Wholly. And still chose the distance. Still chose the silence. Still let the phone ring out without once thinking, he might need me.

Where were you when I needed you most?

It rang, and rang, and rang.

And somewhere, he is almost certain, she never even heard it.

Or worse,

She did.

That is the thought that undoes him, every time. Not the easy to remember moments, not the grandiose, sweet moments, but the small, quiet ones. The ones that slipped by, that looked ordinary even though it’s not.

The last time she laughed at something he said.

The last time she fell asleep beside him in the library, her notes scattered, her breathing slow and even, her face so peaceful he didn't dare move for two hours just to keep the moment intact.

The last time she reached for his hand without thinking about it.

He didn't know they were lasts. That's the thing. That's the unbearable, unspeakable thing. None of it came with a warning. There was no final chapter heading, no gentle narrator whispering, hold on tighter, this is the last time she'll look at you like that.

He would have held on tighter.

He would have memorized the exact weight of her head on his shoulder. Would have counted the seconds. Would have pressed the moment between his palms like a flower in a book, fragile, preserved, something to return to when winter came.

It's all love and butterflies until that same butterfly had flown away from him.

He just didn't know that when she stopped reaching for his hand, she was already letting go. That every unanswered text was a quiet goodbye. That every time she laughed a little less around him, she was already rehearsing a life without him in it.

He didn't know.

He was still planting flowers in a garden she had already decided to leave.

Still writing her name in the margins of his notebooks like a devotion.

Still saving the last sip of every drink, the way he used to, because she always wanted a taste of whatever he had, and old habits, it turns out, don't know how to mourn.

They just keep going.

The way he kept going.

The way he is still, somehow, here, on this bench, in this cold, holding a love so heavy it has become indistinguishable from grief, waiting for a season that is never going to come back, for a girl who is never going to turn the corner and find him sitting here, the way she used to, the way that made everything feel like it was exactly where it was supposed to be.

He was supposed to be hers.

He was so sure of it.

He had planned a whole life. A whole, quiet, ordinary, beautiful life, and she was in every single part of it. In the morning coffee and the late night walks and the way he always imagined turning to his side one day and finding her still there, still his, still Karina, laughing at something he said that wasn't even that funny.

But you cannot keep someone who was never yours to keep.

And you cannot mourn something that never had a name.

That is the loneliest grief of all, no funeral, no closure, no moment you can point to and say here, this is where it ended. Just a slow, bleeding realization that the person you loved most has been gone for a long time, and you were the last to know.

He exhales.

The bench is cold beneath him. The campus moves around him, students passing, laughing, living, and not a single one of them knows that a man is sitting here coming apart at the seams, quietly, the way he has always done everything.

Quietly.

For her.

A love letter she never asked for.

A life she never knew he had already given her.

Winter came.

And he was still dressed for spring.