There was once when she laughed at all he said, even the unfunny jokes. When her eyes brightened upon seeing his name on her phone, and their chats continued until the sun broke through the windows.
They weren't perfect, but they were real.
He recalled the small gestures she had once done—leaving lengthy voice messages, bookmarking his beloved memes so that she could share them with him later, or texting randomly, "I miss you," amidst her hectic schedule. He clung to these moments as pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that fit only when they were together.
Time is a stealthy thief, however.
Gradually, the responses became brief. The voice messages ceased. The "I miss you"s became "I'm busy." He sensed the change before he ever uttered it. Love doesn't typically disappear in a storm; it disappears in silence. It withers in unanswered texts and half-hearted phone calls.
She didn't leave him in an instant.
She disappeared in the silences, in the shift in tone, in the exhausted eyes that no longer twinkled at his presence. She disappeared each time she smiled into her phone, but not because of him. Each time she said, "I'm okay," but did not mean it.
And then one day, she was simply. gone.
No grand battle. No resolution. Just a plain text that said, "I think I need time to figure things out."
He read it over a hundred times, hoping to know where everything went wrong. But sometimes love isn't lost due to something one did—it's just that one person lost interest.
And that's what hurt the most.
She didn't leave because he wasn't enough.
She left because she no longer cared to stay.