Static

I learned early that love has a sound. It is doors closing softly— or more often, slamming shut, wrapped in chains and barbed wire.

It is phones that stop lighting up.

It is someone saying “I’m just tired” and meaning of you.

No one ever leaves loudly. They leave in inches. In shorter replies. In slower smiles. In hands that forget your shape.

I collect these disappearances like receipts. Proof that I am consistent in my absence from permanence.

They touch me like I am temporary. Like a waiting room. Like something you sit in until something better arrives.

I become good at being useful. Good at listening. Good at shrinking. Good at pretending I don’t notice when I am being replaced by silence.

Sometimes I wonder if there is something wrong with the way I love— too deep, too fast, too much like drowning for people who only wanted to get their feet wet. I make myself quieter. Softer. Easier to forget. Still, I am forgotten.

I memorize the moment when affection expires. It always looks the same:

a pause,

a sigh, a look past me, instead of at me. I stop asking why it keeps happening. Patterns don’t need explanations.

At night, I lie beside ghosts of conversations that almost meant something. I replay them until even hope feels fictional. I don’t think I’m unlovable. That would be dramatic. I think I am lovable in theory.

In imagination.

In other people’s futures— just never in mine. So I carry my heart like contraband.

Hidden.

Illegal.

Something no one is willing to be caught holding. And I move through love like static on a radio—present, persistent, never quite becoming a song.