WRONG CAUSE

They call it love but it's more like the weather; unpredictable, unforgiving, and you're always dressed wrong for it. One day you're the reason she smiles at her phone screen, the next you're a notification she swipes away. Same person, same heart, different algorithm in her head determining your value by the hour.

 

I loved you in the wrong time zone, 

when affection was a glitch, not a feature, 

when my tenderness became spam in your inbox.

 

The modern betrayal isn't infidelity it's ambiguity. It’s the clueless things that runs you aground, tiny escape latches littered on the relationship on purpose.

It's the "I need space" that means "I found someone else but I'm keeping you on read just in case."

It's the breadcrumbs disguised as effort, the late-night texts that mean nothing in the morning light.

You become a situationship, a vibe, a maybe never a certainty. And certainty, that's what you're desperate for. Just a straight answer in a world of "let's see where this goes."

 

You changed the rules mid game, 

called my consistency "clingy," 

my distance "neglect." 

Tell me which man to be   

I'll queue him up, deliver him to your door

 

She doesn't know what she took from me. Maybe she does. Maybe that's the point to take without accounting, to consume without consequence. So now I smoke pipes for peace, let the bitterness curl up in clouds around me. I spit my sorrows to the quiet ears of bottles, those patient listeners who never interrupt, never judge, never suddenly decide I'm too much or not enough.

 

The logic of today's love is very similar to some top tier economics: disruption over stability, the next best thing over the good thing you have.

 I was a sweetheart when it was convenient, cringe when your friends were watching, triggering when I asked for what you promised. My crime was believing in linear time that yesterday's "I love you" had any bearing on today.

They say you can't pour from an empty cup, but nobody tells you how quickly someone will drain you and call it, self-care. How your exhaustion becomes an aesthetic, your heartbreak becomes just another milestone on their healing journey. You're not a person; you're a lesson they'll learn on their way to someone else.

I built a home in your inconsistency, 

learned to sleep through emotional earthquakes, 

called your chaos "passionate," 

your coldness "independent."

If fuel of love decides your fate, then baby, you kept me running on fumes. Made me believe scarcity was romance, that if I just adjusted the temperature of my affection, found the perfect balance between present and absent, I could be the right cause. But there is no right cause when someone's already decided you're the wrong effect.

So here I am, in the aftermath, learning that desperate isn't a look anyone wears well. That sometimes the smoke isn't a signal it's just me, trying to obscure the parts of myself I gave away to someone who treated my heart like a sample.

The bottles listen better than you ever did, 

and the smoke? 

The smoke asks nothing in return.

Walk with me to my altar of silence. Let me raise some fragrance that clouds my thoughts and sweep me from reality. Bottles are passive this one, I raise to the highest.

 Maybe forever was meant for memories only and not people. Think about it we curate moments like museum pieces, preserve them in amber, but the people in them? They're already becoming someone else by the time we've finished saving the memory. That night she told you she couldn't imagine life without you, voice breaking with sincerity? That moment is eternal. The woman who said it? She's a ghost now, replaced by someone who can't remember why she ever felt that way.

 We take photographs because we understand, instinctively, that people are unreliable narrators of their own devotion. The version of her that loved you exists only in retrospect, frozen in the past tense. "Remember when we were good?" Yeah, I remember. I remember so hard it hurts. But remembering doesn't resurrect. It just proves that some things are more permanent in their absence than they ever were in their presence.

 

Forever lives in the archives, 

in the screenshots of conversations, 

in the worn-out memory of her laugh, 

in the ghost of her perfume on an old shirt.

 The cruelty is this: we're made to believe forever means people staying, but maybe forever was always about the imprint, not the person. The way she changed you, the inside jokes that no one else will ever understand, the specific ache that has her name on it those are permanent. But her? She gets to evolve past you, shed you like an old skin, become someone who finds your memory embarrassing at dinner parties.

 People have expiration dates written in invisible ink. You don't see it coming the slow fade, the imperceptible shift from "us" to "you and me" to "you" and "me, somewhere else, with someone else." But the moments? Those rest forever. They stain, they bruise, they scar. They become the hardest thing you carry. Heavier than any promise she broke, more constant than any love she claimed.

 So, I sit here with my smoke and my bottles, tending to the forever she left behind. The memory of us is mine to keep, mine to mourn, mine to eventually make peace with. She gets to move on. I get to remember. And maybe that's the trade we never agreed to but signed anyway she walks into her future unburdened, and I carry ours alone. Sitting at this table, staring at everything I used to be. Looking back at my best moments in life the times I felt alive, the times I felt loved, the times I thought I had it figured out. All of it penned down on paper. My last words to her. To me. To whoever the fuck is listening.

 I rolled it up tight, added a little devil's lettuce to ease the pain, because why not? If she wasn't destined for me, then let these words rise as smoke. Let them float up into the air for anyone out there who actually gives a fuck. Maybe someone will catch them. Maybe they'll just disappear like everything else.

 Lighter in hand now, Flame kissing the edge of the paper. Watching my past curl and blacken and burn. The ink bleeding into ash. I take a drag, inhaling what's left of the man I used to be the romantic, the believer, the fool.

 The smoke fills my lungs.

 Holds for a second.

Then leaves.

Just like she did.

The end?

Nah.

This is just me learning how to forget.

 

She'll become someone who used to know me,

and I'll become someone who can't forget her,

and the forever between us?

It was never about the staying

it was always about the haunting.

husH