Letter 1.

This isn’t a love letter, but a quiet plea for your love to remember me.

This is me—bare, asking to be held in return.

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To "The one who never stayed", Every time you make me feel like my love falls short, something in me recedes.

A piece of my heart — gone.

(Creating a void.)

Perhaps affection terrifies you. Perhaps vulnerability feels like drowning. But each time I offer a piece of me — trembling, soft — and you turn your gaze, it burns.

The ache incinerates what I gave, and I am left with the ashes — but my body does not know how to carry the weight of what no longer breathes.

I try to come closer, but the path is lit with embers.

Each step forward, I feel the heat, but your scent — your presence — fades.

You drift.

Further.

Out of reach.

I cry — not with tears, but with the hollow, breathless kind.

Can you hear it?

Or has my grief become background noise?

Or worse —

do you not hear because you do not care?

Maybe I loved the fire because I loved you. Maybe I feared it more, feared it enough to let it consume me, to let it kiss me only with its warmth and never with its mercy.

Why didn’t you just throw me in?

You were meant to, you were always meant to.

You say my words drip sadness, that every line I write of you tastes like grief.

But tell me — isn’t this how love is sometimes felt?

Not soft. Not sweet.

But sharp. Burning. Bleeding.

You could have chased me.

You didn’t.

You let me slip through.

So hold me once, before I disappear.

Tell me what it’s like to be touched by fire —and I’ll show you how I was born just to burn for you.