A few of them are genuine.
Most? Not even close.
But either way, there’s no happy ending waiting on the other side of their ‘Heys.’
The guilt hits me every time I open the app.
Like I’m cheating on Blake.
Like I’m living two lives: one in a digital circus and the other in a silent, suffocating grief.
I wanted to tell him everything. Share this silly experience with him. Ask him which photo to use, which bio sounded less desperate.
But I can’t.
Because he left.
And now the only place I see him is in dreams, I wake from clawing at sheets that no longer smell like him.
I’m curled into the corner of the love seat that once sat in my grandparents’ sunroom.
My phone vibrates against my thigh.
I twist the glass of cider in my hand, the ice clinking like tiny bells of distraction.
I wonder, for the thousandth time, why he left.
Why he gave up.
Could I have stopped it? Was there a word, a moment, asomethingI missed that might’ve kept him here?
How do you hurt someone you promised a lifetime to?
He said it wasn’t my fault.
But I saw it.
I felt it.
In the way his eyes changed when he held our baby.
The way his shoulders caved under the weight of goodbye.
I carried her for nine months.
Breathed her in.
Dreamed of her laughter.
And then everything went wrong.
He held her against his chest and kissed her still face, and I watched the man I loved collapse without a sound.
There was blame behind his tears. Exhaustion. Loss.
And a hate that maybe wasn’t for me but settled in the space between us like rot.
I lift the cider to my lips and catch my reflection in the glass.
