On the train to Liverpool Street when you pass Bethnal Green and catch a glimpse of that pub where you met

Listen —

there is a particular kind of delusion that says heartbreak is a code to be cracked, that somewhere in the transcript of what he said and didn't say there is a key, and if you could only find it, turn it, you could have unlocked a different ending. This is not true. It was never true. You have spent years building a cathedral out of his silences, reading them like scripture, like there was a god in there worth finding.

There is no god in there.

There is no sentence.

He didn't love you enough. Say it plain, the way you'd report a fact of weather, a fact of tide. Not enough to stay. Not enough to choose you over the smaller, safer version of himself he kept retreating into. Not enough to become the man you kept insisting, against all evidence, he could be — because you believed, the way we're taught to believe, that love is a thing you can build if you just carry enough of it yourself.

You cannot build it alone. No one ever has.

This is not a failure of your softness. Not your face. Not your patience, worn down to its last thread. Love that requires you to disappear a little more each year was never love shaped to hold you — it was something else wearing love's clothes, and you are not the first woman to mistake the costume for the thing.

The train slows past Bethnal Green.

The pub is still there. Still lit from inside like nothing ever happened.

One day — not today, maybe not this year — you will stop calling it bad timing. You will stop calling it potential. You will stop, finally, calling it your fault, because that word was never yours to carry.

Someone who didn't love you enough.

That's all it ever was.