The coffee has gone cold, a dark mirror reflecting a ceiling I no longer recognize. Across the table, your silence is a heavy curtain, draped over the words we used to speak like a second language.

You ask for distance, so I will give you an ocean. You ask for silence, so I will become a ghost in your contact list. I will take my heart—bruised, yes, but still beating—and walk until the sound of your name is just another word in a crowded room.

There is a strange mercy in the end. Like a song fading out on a radio station as you drive into the mountains, the melody of us is losing its signal. I am untethering the anchors. I am handing back the keys to a house that was built on sand.