Fragments of Cassandra

You wrote me a novel
after months of silence.

Not love letters.
Autopsy notes.

Pages of explanations,
fear dressed up as certainty,
the mathematics of resentment.

You told me
you were drowning.

That no matter how hard you worked,
your hands closed around water.

That every future we spoke into existence
became another burden,
another fear,
another reason to dread tomorrow.

You told me
you couldn’t save,
couldn’t breathe,
couldn’t buy the ring,
couldn’t carry the weight
of all the futures we built out loud.

You said
the math was supposed to work.

As if love
were a bridge
that collapsed beneath
the weight of ordinary things.

Fear.
Expectations.
Survival.

Two frightened people
mistaking endurance
for incompatibility.

You told me
you reprogrammed yourself.

Taught your heart
to survive without me.

You cried.
Accepted it.
Buried us alive
with your own hands
and called it healing.

You said
our hearts were compatible,
but our minds were not.

You said
I deserved better.

You said
I was amazing.

Strong.
Funny.
Beautiful.

You said
I had light.

You said
I would find someone else.

You said
you wanted me happy.

You said,
you said,
you said-

and somehow
none of it answered
the only question
that has kept me awake.

Did you love me?

Or did you simply love
the version of yourself
you hoped to become beside me?

Because I have read your words
so many times
that I’ve memorized their shape.

I know exactly where
you called yourself unworthy.

Where you decided
you were not meant for marriage.

Where you said that
being asked to leave
was a wound
you would never forgive.

I know every sentence.

But I still don’t know
if you loved me.

Because afterward,
when I reached toward you
to understand-

you became someone else.

Cold.
Sharp-edged.

A stranger wearing
the face of the man
who once memorized
the sound of my laugh.

I asked questions.

You locked the door.

You said
we didn’t need closure.

As though closure
isn’t simply another word
for witnessing.

As though understanding
is an indulgence.

As though grief
doesn’t leave fingerprints
underneath the skin.

So I have lived here instead-
between what you wrote
and who you became.

Between
“You deserve better,”
and
“I’m too busy to talk”

Between
“I loved you,”

and the way
you spoke to me
like kindness
had become too expensive.

I have searched myself
for the explanation.

Maybe I asked for too much.
Maybe I wasn’t soft enough.
Maybe I loved too loudly.
Maybe I was impossible to keep.
Maybe people don’t turn into strangers.
Maybe they simply stop pretending
to recognize you.

There are days
I feel embarrassed by my own devotion.

Violated
by the tenderness
I placed in your hands.

I built a home inside someone
who had already begun
planning the exit.

I let you know
the names of my fears.

I showed you
the soft underbelly
of being alive.

And now I wonder
if loving someone
who leaves this way
means they never loved you at all.

Or if this-
this unbearable transformation—

is what happens
when love curdles
under the weight
of grief,
resentment,
survival,
and two frightened people
who stopped speaking
the same language.

I don’t know.

That’s the truth.

I don’t know.

I don’t know
how someone can call you their future
and then speak to you like a burden.

I don’t know
how someone can write,
“You have a light the world deserves to see,”

and then refuse
to sit beside you
long enough to explain
why they blew out
their own.

I don’t know
which version of you
was real.

The man who held me.
The man who was ok with leaving,

Or the one who wrote
a eulogy for us
and mailed it months too late.

What I know is this:

I have been carrying
both of you.

The person I loved.

And the stranger
who took his place.

And perhaps
that is why
I feel unreal now.

Like I am watching my own life
through thick glass.

Like the world is happening
a few inches away from me.

Like somewhere,
in another universe,

we are still sitting at the kitchen table,
laughing at stupid jokes,
making plans,
believing love was enough.

But here
in this universe;

all I have
is a letter full of explanations
and a silence that followed it.

And I am trying,
God, I am trying,

to learn that unanswered questions
are not evidence that I was unworthy.

That being left
does not make me unlovable.

That confusion
is not proof
that I imagined
being cherished.

Maybe one day
I will stop rereading
the only time
you ever truly spoke.

Maybe one day
I will forgive myself
for not understanding.

For still loving
someone
I can no longer find.

But tonight,

I am just a woman
holding a eulogy
written by the living,

trying to figure out
how someone can say,

“You deserve a love that fills your cup,”

while teaching me what it feels like
to grieve someone who poured out every
last drop



Be’ahava,
The Mourning Bird