Unspoken

There was a city built on repetition—brick after brick, step after step—where history presses close enough to feel personal. Rain clung to the air that day. Everything smelled old, deliberate, unresolved. We sat across from each other in a narrow coffee shop meant for passing time, not altering it. Paper cups between us. Steam rising. Hands close enough to notice, far enough to remain untouched. My life changed forever in that moment.

I remember thinking how quiet it was, and how dangerous that quiet felt.

Nothing about it announced significance. No music. No cinematic pause. Just two people sitting still long enough for meaning to gather. The kind of moment you only recognize later—after it’s already rearranged you.

That was where it began. Or maybe where it failed to begin. The distinction matters more than people admit. We kissed. I hoped it would be the first of many.

Later, there was a different place.
Across oceans. Across distance.
An apartment borrowed from another life, holding the faint residue of someone else’s routines. The light was wrong in a way that made time feel optional. Hours passed without being counted. We talked late into the night until the edges blurred—stories, regrets, half-confessions drifting into the open like things that had waited years to be allowed to exist.

We stayed awake long past reason.
We stayed close without crossing.

We never touched intimately.
Not once.
Not even when silence pressed in so tightly it felt intentional.

For me, that restraint has never stopped echoing.

People talk about intimacy as proximity, as skin, as contact. But what we did was something else entirely. It was deliberate denial. A shared decision to hold everything just short of irreversible. As if keeping our hands to ourselves could keep the future intact. As if self-control could be mistaken for wisdom.

I wanted to tell you then.
The sentence was already there, fully formed, waiting.
Not romantic. Not poetic.
Just true.

“I love you.”, but I never said it.

It sat behind my teeth for hours, for days, for weeks—an unspoken weight that changed the way I breathed. But I convinced myself silence was the responsible choice. That naming it would fracture something fragile. That if I waited long enough, the feeling would recede on its own.

It didn’t.

Instead, it calcified.
It became something permanent.

Now those places return without warning. A table with two cups. A room where nothing happened. They surface in the middle of unrelated moments—grocery aisles, empty roads, late nights when the mind stops pretending it’s finished with the past. They are not memories of what we did, but of what we withheld. And that makes them heavier than nostalgia has any right to be.

There is a particular cruelty in moments that are almost enough.

They don’t end cleanly.
They linger.
They attach themselves to the architecture of your thinking.

I don’t replay them because I want them back. I replay them because they remain unfinished. Because they carry a truth that never found a place to land. Because they represent a version of myself that was briefly honest, briefly unguarded, and then locked away for the sake of order and “safety”.

I don’t believe this was a mistake. I believe it was something real that entered a world unwilling to accommodate it. Not everything fails because it’s wrong. Some things fail because they refuse to be small.

So this is where it goes. Not to you. Not to the past. But here—among the other records of absence and restraint and things that were felt deeply and expressed nowhere.

I loved you.

That sentence existed in every room we shared. It simply never crossed the distance between us. I held it behind my teeth like a secret.

And now it exists only as this: a quiet weight, a withheld truth,
a place I still know how to find even though I will never return, and if I tried, you would never accept me again. I’m more sorry than you could ever know.