When the Rain Began to Fall 🌧️💔

It started like every other quiet evening - her voice soft in my ear, laughter spilling between the static of our call. Edcel Mae had that way of making even the smallest moments feel like they belonged in a storybook. She was talking about something silly, something about the rain that had caught her off guard on her way home, and I could picture the droplets clinging to her hair, her cheeks flushed from the cold.

But even then, I caught it - a pause between her words, the kind that slipped in like an unwanted guest. She recovered quickly, laughing again, but my chest tightened. It was such a small thing... yet it felt like the first crack in a glass I had always believed was unbreakable.

Days later, the pauses grew longer. Messages took hours to arrive, and when they did, they were short, almost mechanical. "I'm fine," she'd say, but her words felt thinner than the air between us. I found myself holding my phone tighter, staring at our old conversations, wondering if I was losing her without her ever saying the words.

And when she finally did look me in the eye - not through a screen, but in person - there was something fragile in her gaze. A storm I couldn't calm. A truth I wasn't ready to hear. And maybe... maybe the rain had been warning me all along.