you had no language for me

i think about you
more often than i want to admit.
not because i miss you,
but because i still find pieces of myself that you built without asking.

from the very beginning,
i should have known.
everything about how we started
felt heavy, strained—
like we were forcing puzzle pieces that didn’t belong together.
but somehow,
even through the weight of it all,
i know the moments we had were real.
real in the way a wildfire is real —
destructive, beautiful,
impossible to survive untouched.

i knew you
in ways i don't think you’ll ever understand.
i could have written your entire autobiography,
your hidden chapters
and unfinished sentences,
your fears disguised as anger,
the way your eyes flickered
when you were about to lie.
i memorized the language of your silences.
but you —
you barely even learned how to say my name
without it feeling foreign in your mouth.
you had no language for me.
you never even tried to find one.

sometimes
i find parts of me
that i know came from you,
stitched into me when i wasn’t looking.
and there are days
i want to rip them out,
piece by piece,
until nothing that touched you remains.
but the truth is,
i am not who i am without you.
and i hate that.
and i am grateful for that.
both things can be true at the same time.

i don't resent you.
i don't regret us.
but if i could go back,
i would have left sooner.
i would have saved myself the slow bleeding
that came from trying to hold
something that never held me back.

there were so many things
i wanted to say
when it still mattered.
so many truths
that rotted inside me
because i knew
you didn’t have the words to understand them.

and maybe
that’s what hurts the most —
not that you let me go,
but that you never even knew what you were holding.

if you ever cared enough to ask,
if you ever turned back
long enough to see the wreckage —
this is what you would have found:

someone who knew you down to the marrow.
someone you never even bothered to meet halfway.
someone who deserved a place in your language —
but became a footnote in your forgetting.