The Stranger I Like

I wasn’t planning to cry tonight.

But you know how feelings work —

like unsent drafts you thought you deleted,

they come back.

Louder. Uninvited.

I’m not asking for the moon.

I just want a glimpse, a borrowed second of him looking at me the way I look at my screen when his name pops up.

I crave nothing extravagant. Just one glance.

One heartbeat-long moment that says, “I see you too.”

But love…

Love isn’t a vending machine.

You don’t insert poems and expect affection to roll out.

And yet, here I am... 

The girl who carved universes in footnotes,

who folded feelings like origami,

and mailed them in the form of verses

that sounded like metaphors

but spelled his name in silence.

He read them.

He said “beautiful.”

But he never saw himself in them.

He never saw me behind them.

I’ve been screaming affection in lowercase.

And he’s been replying with full stops.

The worst part isn’t that he didn’t love me back.

The worst part is — he never even noticed the emotions I had for him. 

And maybe that’s where I lost it.

When I realized I became the kind of person

who builds cathedrals out of maybes

and kneels at the altar of someone

who never planned to show up.

Some nights, I lie awake and wonder 

what do you do with all this love

when the only person it’s for

is already walking in a different direction?

I became a playlist of unsaid things.

Every stanza I wrote

was a breadcrumb I hoped he’d follow back to me.

But he never did.

And I can’t blame him.

You can’t fault a map for not leading somewhere it never promised to go.

I used to think if I tried hard enough... 

loved loud enough... 

he’d turn around.

But love isn’t a volume knob.

You can scream and still not be heard

by someone tuned to a different frequency.

And maybe that’s the lesson I didn’t want to learn:

You can be art in someone’s world

and still not be their favorite frame.

I don’t want him to be a life lesson in my story.

I wanted to be the plot twist.

The stay. The person he texted randomly

because “you crossed my mind again.”

But I wasn’t.

I was the gentle detour.

The almost.

I didn’t fall for his face.

I fell for the silence he made feel safe,

the way he unknowingly tucked peace into his sentences,

and how his existence felt like

a place I wanted to live in, forever.

But forever isn’t always mutual.

So maybe I won’t stop loving him because love doesn’t come with off switches 

but I will stop writing stories

where he’s the ending

when he was only ever the middle.

I will stop waiting for him to decode my metaphors

like they held hidden doors to my soul.

Because if someone doesn’t try to know you 

to really know you 

they never deserved the poems in the first place.

I’ll rise.

Not like phoenixes from ashes 

I’m too tired for that kind of fire.

But maybe like mist.

Soft.

Undeniable.

And hard to hold again.

Because I’ve learned 

If they don’t chase you now,

they’ll miss you when they can’t anymore.

Not in the present. 

But in those strange, cruel echoes life leaves behind.

At 2:13 a.m.

In the smell of a book

In between his late night shifts. 

Maybe then, he’ll remember.

Maybe he’ll scroll through old messages,

pause on my name,

and say:

“She loved me.”

And maybe he’ll smile.

Or maybe he’ll ache.

But it’ll be too late.

And I?

I’ll be somewhere better.

Not healed. Not over it.

But breathing.

Because some stories don’t need closure.

They just need an ending

that doesn’t hurt to read out loud anymore.