Depletion does not announce itself. It arrives the way erosion does — slowly, then completely, until one day you look inward and find that the rivers have run dry, the earth is bare, and all that remains is the faint memory of what fullness once felt like.

It simply accumulates. In the places no one thinks to check. 

The cruelest thing about being loved by the right person at the wrong time is that you can feel both things at once — the warmth of it, and the terror. The kind that lives deeper than words. Deeper than confession. It doesn't ask to be spoken — it simply sits, heavy and wordless, in the chest of someone who has already learned that being known can be its own kind of loss.

He had been running out of himself for a long time. The ground gone dry. The light gone cold. And still she came — persistent, warm, refusing to be pushed away. And that was the thing that undid him the most. Not her absence. Her presence.

The terrifying, relentless fact of her.

But what if she saw it. The real interior. The darkness he had built his whole life inside of.

Would she still stay?

He never asked.

These are the words that lived only in him — in the space between her love and his fear, in the silence he chose over and over again.

Unnamed. Unvoiced.