NOT QUITE OVER

She once tried to erase him from her life the way people try to outrun a storm-by pretending it was never there. She told herself that time would quiet his voice, that one day she would wake up and feel nothing at all. But every morning proved her wrong. Because no matter how hard she tried to move forward, his presence lingered in the quiet spaces of her mind-the memory of his patience, the gentleness in the way he looked at her, as if she was still someone worth fighting for.

And the more she tried to understand why the past refused to fade, the more the truth began to unravel. Maybe it wasn't because he stayed the same. Maybe it wasn't because he never stopped caring. Maybe it was because she never truly let him go either. Not in the way that mattered. Because the cruelest realization of all was this: love had never really left between them-and if that was true, then perhaps the only person she had been running from all along... was herself.