Close Enough to Hurt

There’s always a third.

Sometimes it’s a person.
Sometimes a ghost.
Sometimes just the version of yourself you’re still trying to save.

Triangulation isn’t geometry. It’s choreography—
a dance of avoidance mistaken for connection.
One person reaching, one retreating, one pretending the pattern is fate.

You learn how to lean just far enough to be touched
without risking collapse.
You tell yourself love can stretch across delay,
across silence,
across unspoken grief.
That giving without asking is grace.

You call the absence circumstantial.
The silence, mutual.
You forget how to ask in your own language.

Sometimes the third isn’t the person you’re with.
It’s the one you're still apologizing to.
Or the one who taught you to mistake scarcity for love.

You love like a triangle not because you want to—
but because your nervous system memorized the script.
You keep casting new actors in old roles,
wondering why the lines still sting.

You thought you were the one left waiting.

And you were.
But someone was waiting for you, too.

While you stood at the locked door of someone else's silence,
someone else stood outside yours,
knocking.

You didn’t hear it.
The house was too full—
of echoes,
of rehearsed apologies,
of withheld goodbyes.

What was done to you became the shape you offered.
Not out of malice.
Out of muscle memory.
Out of the reflex that says: this is what closeness feels like—
distant, familiar, survivable.

You called it space.
You called it honesty.
But it was still a version of vanishing.
Still a way of holding someone close enough
to be seen,
but not close enough to stay.

You didn’t know, then,
that you were fluent in almost.
That you had mastered the choreography of leaving,
even while staying.

And maybe you meant well.
But kindness without clarity is still a fog.
It softens the blow—
but blurs the edge
until no one can name what cut them.

You weren’t the villain.
But you weren’t only the wounded either.

You were the middle note in a song that hurt both ways.

Remorse doesn’t arrive with a crash.
It comes soft—
like someone else’s voice in your mouth.

You’re mid-sentence when you hear it—
a line that once broke you
slipping out in your own tone,
toward someone who didn’t see it coming.

It lands like dropped silverware—
not loud,
but unmistakable.

And there it is:
not guilt,
but recognition.

You didn’t mean to withhold.
You thought you were protecting them.
From your uncertainty.
From the grief you hadn’t yet named.
From the mess of not knowing what you wanted.

But you see it now:
how your careful words became riddles,
how your silence felt like a test,
how your affection rang like a promise
you never meant to keep.

You thought you were being honest.
But honesty without responsibility
is just another kind of manipulation.

And the worst part?
You understand exactly how they felt.
Because you’ve been there.

You didn’t set out to be the person who said just enough to keep someone hoping.
You just hadn’t stopped hoping yourself.

You were still carrying someone else’s ghost—
and left someone else holding yours.