I have figured something out—though I would be a fool to believe I have figured it all out.

For weeks, my mind has been trying to finish sentences that were never spoken.
To close loops. To make sense of the quiet where answers should have been.
Closure, I now see, cannot come through your presence or your explanation.
It has to be made without you.

Three a.m. nights. Seven a.m. mornings.

Exhaustion became the backdrop, and writing became the only honest place left to go. Not because I expect anything from this—but because one day, perhaps, you may read it. And because I needed to hear myself clearly.

My mind returns to one of the first things you said to me.

After an entire evening together—after laughter, after effort, after moving beds through Maastricht—you said: “You made me feel something real.”

At the time, I heard it as sweetness. Later, I understood it as revelation.

If that moment was real for you, then what came before it?

What had been normal?

What is the opposite of real?

That question stayed with me.

One night, it surfaced again—unexpectedly—while scrolling, noticing a page you followed. Images of women performing: bodies curated, movements offered outward, desire shaped for consumption. Dancing that looked impressive but felt hollow. Movement without surrender. Expression without embodiment.

And my body reacted before my mind did. My nose crinkled—not in judgment, but in recognition. Because it was so far from how I move through the world. I dance because something moves me. Because sound touches memory, grief, pleasure, soul. I don’t perform to be seen; I move because I already am.

That was the moment I understood the distance between us.

Your world had taught you how to assemble an image: shape the body, remove the hair, add the tattoo, perfect the surface. All ways of saying “I am whole”—without ever having to sit with the parts that felt empty, unformed, unfinished.

And still—this matters—there was beauty in what happened between us.

Because to be touched, even briefly, by something real can feel intoxicating. To be seen past the exterior, to have the softer places noticed, can awaken curiosity. Hope, even.
I imagine that being chosen—seen in your contradictions and still met with care—felt unfamiliar, maybe overwhelming.

But recognition alone is not transformation.

When something in me pulled you forward—into discomfort, into honesty, into growth—you leaned back. Not because you were incapable, but because capacity has to be built from the inside. Someone who has only tasted realness cannot live there yet.
Not without doing the work that makes the body able to hold it.

And I know my nature now: men do not meet me and remain unchanged.

I invite evolution simply by being as I am. At that threshold, a choice is required.

You chose what was familiar.

It became easier to return to the external, to the roles you knew how to play, than to stay with the destabilizing truth reflected back to you. Each inconsistency named, each absence felt, echoed an old belief—I am not enough—and instead of meeting it, you retreated. Not out of malice. Out of self-preservation.

I see that now.

And here is the sword: I will not mistake limitation for fate again.

I will not shrink the invitation, soften the truth, or carry someone across a bridge they refuse to walk. What we shared was real—but realness cannot be sustained without courage. Without the willingness to be seen, disrupted, and reshaped.

I brought you to the door. What happens beyond it is no longer mine to hold.

There was sweetness. That is true. And there was an ending. That is also true.

Both can exist—without bitterness,

without return.