You Don't Want To See This

I don’t ask if they miss me. I don’t ask if they meant it. I don’t ask who they think of when it’s late and raining. There are things I’ve learned not to ask because I’ve already seen the answer.

The truth is: my eyes have always been the most honest person in the room. They caught things I wasn’t ready to understand and held onto them anyway. They registered the flinch, the shift, the stare, long before I could name what it meant. They’re faster. Sharper. Cruel, sometimes, in their clarity.

I’ve seen enough to understand that love doesn’t need to be spoken to be destroyed. That a glance can rupture what a conversation could never clarify because the body doesn’t lie. Not when it leans toward someone else. Not when it turns away. Not when it forgets to wait at the door.

These are the things I wish I hadn’t noticed, scenes that reshaped everything I thought I understood.

Like the moment I watched someone I loved watch someone else leave. It was nothing, and it was everything. I saw their hand resting on the back of the chair. Their eyes following the movement, the smile, the door opening and closing. That’s how I knew. The part of them that used to pause for me was already gone, pulled silently into someone else’s orbit.

Or the drink. It wasn’t mine. It was set in front of someone else. And it wasn’t that I wanted it, it was that someone else had been chosen. It sounds stupid. It is stupid. But because I saw it, my body remembered. Something about the way the glass touched down, soft and declarative, made everything that came before it irrelevant.

I wish I hadn’t seen the lights on when I passed their house. I wasn’t supposed to be walking that way. I wasn’t supposed to look. But I did. The window was lit. And the shadow, whoever it was, stood in the kitchen, moving comfortably, like they knew where the mugs were kept. I thought: of course. I thought: maybe they’ve always known where the mugs were kept.

And then there was the text. The way the screen lit up when they weren’t looking. The name I didn’t recognize. The way the message preview didn’t use punctuation, like it wasn’t their first time talking. I wish I could say I didn’t read it. I wish I could say it didn’t stick. But it did. It lived at the top of the phone like a bruise. The worst part of being in love with someone who doesn’t have anything to hide is you’ll still find something. You can’t help but see it.

No one ever admits these things. Not directly. They say they’re tired, they say they’re confused. They say: nothing happened. They say they’re not ready, that it’s not the right time. But I saw what happened. That was the problem.

I don’t need a story. I just need the memory to stop playing on loop. I need my eyes to forget how it looked.

I think love often ends long before we realize. It ends in glances. In silences. In doorways and driveways and stairwells. It ends at parties, over dinner, on long walks home. It ends the second your body knows you’re no longer being chosen.

That’s the truth.

That’s the curse.

And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.