Written StudiosLove on Ice
We began like flint against stone—sharp glances, reluctant curiosity,two young strangers circling
the quiet offense of being exactly what the other could not ignore.
You wore distance like armor,and I matched it with careful indifference,though something in me already recognized the shape of you.
We thawed in fragments—through borrowed pages,half-finished sketches,arguments sharpened by brilliance,and dreams spoken softly as though naming them might make them fragile.
You were challenge and comfort.
The rare equal who could quiet my storms without extinguishing them.
The only place I ever let myself soften without shame.
And when truth threatened to bloom between us—that dangerous, trembling thing—we buried it quickly,covering sparks with the safer language
of friendship.
Platonic.
Simple.
Safe.
Though my heart had already betrayed me.
So I stayed—loving you quietly,
from corners you never thought to search.
I watched you reach for others,watched your hands learn unfamiliar warmth,while I became
the steady place you returned to when those borrowed fires turned cold.
And I let you.
Because losing myself felt easier than losing you.
We built our world from shared passions, stitched together through ambition,creativity,
and the reckless certainty that we understood each other better than anyone else could.
But time,with its subtle cruelty,
began to widen what closeness once concealed.
Still, I stood beside you
through grief,through failure,through every season that threatened to unmake you.
And when my own silence arrived—when loss hollowed me out in ways I could not name,
when the parts of me that once burned brightly
fell quiet—you were there.
But not enough.
Not in the way I had once been there for you.
That was how the fracture came.
Not with violence,but with realization.
The unbearable clarity that I could carry your storms,but mine were met with distance.
So now we are this:
Two people who once felt like inevitability,now reduced to careful memory.
Two souls who mistook familiarity for permanence.
And I no longer grieve loudly.
Only softly—
like winter remembering
what warmth used to feel like.
—
