Description: A prose poem about the burnout of a “successful” love story. It explores what happens when you fight the whole world to stay with someone, win, and then realize the victory feels more like a gilded cage. It weaves that exhaustion together with a daydream about a parallel reality where walking away early was actually the kindest thing you could have done for each other.
The porcelain teacups sit in their usual alignment upon the mahogany tray, catching the pale, indifferent light of a Tuesday afternoon that refuses to warm the room.
The silence between us has grown heavy, thickening into a domestic architecture of half-spoken sentences. The melancholic ticking of the clock in the hall.
We are merely ghosts inhabiting the estate we fought so desperately to inherit, bound by the sheer stubbornness of vows spoken in brighter weather.
Every movement across the floorboards feels like an apology for surviving our own romance, turning what should have been a sanctuary into a gilded prison.
A cold draft slips beneath the ill-fitting sash of the front window, carrying the smell of damp earth and the neighbor’s woodsmoke from down the lane.
It’s the sort of weather that invites old regrets to settle over the hearth, whispering of roads untraveled and the strange privilege of having missed each other entirely.
Inside our chests, a profound exhaustion takes root, born not of sudden tragedy but of the slow, grinding realization that devotion can curdle into endurance.
We look at one another across the kitchen table with the polite, distant sorrow of strangers who happened to share an umbrella in a storm that never stopped.
Somewhere out there in the sprawling geometry of alternate skies, another version of our story plays out beneath a very different, kinder constellation of stars.
In that parallel room, we had the good sense to part as the carriage doors closed, preserving our youth like pressed blossoms inside the pages of a forgotten novel.
Here, we chose the harder, quieter mercy of staying until the spark turned completely to ash, trapped forever in the tragic luxury of the life we swore we wanted.
This was written by our contributing writer, Marga Cortez.
Cover Image Source: Pexels, Joel Zar
The other image was provided by our writer, Marga Cortez.
Leave a Reply