I erased your messages yesterday...

I unpinned your name first

From my message tab.

Then from Messenger.

My phone stayed glued to my hand for days, weeks hoping you’d text.

Day by day, the hope faded.

After the New Year.

After two months since you walked out on me.

After I knew, deep down, that you didn’t plan on returning, I realized I had to let you go.

The toothbrush and washcloth I got for you were put away.

The drawer I had emptied for you was filled again.

You planned on staying…but you left like a thief in the night.

Yesterday, I erased your messages.

I had already stopped rereading them, but somehow deleting them felt different.

Like picking at a scab that had finally started to close.

The hole you left hasn’t been filled but it has been softly rearranged.

You can’t erase someone who gave you hope.

Who offered tenderness.

Who helped you bloom.

I wonder if I’ll forget what you look like in a year.

Or if you’ll forget what I look like.

I wonder if we’d cross paths one day and not recognize each other.

If time will make us forget we existed, even briefly, in each other’s lives.

I don’t want to forget you.

But you’ve forgotten me.

So I ask the questions that still ache:

How could someone who said all those things not mean them?

Why lie?

Why hold my heart if you planned to drop it?

Erasing your messages felt like a small death all over again.

Like a door quietly closing on something I thought would last.

And it makes me so sad.

You were the gardener in my garden.

You watered me.

You tended to me.

You watched me bloom and then you left.

My one admirer.

The one who saw both my beauty and my thorns.

How could I have been so foolish?

I don’t open my heart easily.

But you disarmed me from the start.

You said things like you’re my forever person,

I’m all in,

you feel like home.

I’m still confused.

I erased your messages.

Olives and Lima Beans, the names I gave you because you hated them.

Stormy, for your blue eyes.

I remember you saying,I miss your face, Viv. What a beautiful face.

I erased your messages yesterday, and the void rushed in.

The tears surfaced.

Why hold my heart if you were going to crush it?

I put your pictures in a folder today.

I’m not ready to erase those yet.

But I deleted your messages because reading your words broke my heart over and over again.