If you had asked

If You Had Asked

If you had asked me then, I would have answered without hesitation— my heart already leaning forward, ready, steady, believing in the shape of forever.

But silence built its own language, and I’ve been left to translate shadows, wondering where truth ended and where my hope began.

You’ll never know the weight I carried— the way I rehearsed answers to questions you never spoke, the way I folded my dreams into the corners of your absence.

If you had asked, I would have been there— open hands, open heart, offering everything you never reached to take.

Now I am left sifting memories for fragments of honesty, searching for the line between love and illusion.

And all I want— before I turn the page, before I close this chapter— is to know what was real, and let the rest fall away like dust in the light.