Seen at 11:47

I know exactly when he read my text. 11:47 PM. He just didn't care enough to type back.

It was a simple message. "Hey, can we talk?" Six words I'd rehearsed in the mirror like a speech. I even used a comma, because I wanted to seem calm.

Seen 11:47.

I put my phone face down. Picked it up. Face down. Picked it up. I did this for three hours. Then I called my sister, who said, "Babe, he's an idiot," and I said, "Yeah, but he's MY idiot," which is the most pathetic sentence I've ever said.

We were together three years. THREE. We had a plant together. A plant! I'm now a single mother to a fern named Gerald.

He didn't leave dramatically. No cheating, no screaming, no plot twist. He just slowly stopped trying, and I kept trying harder, like love was a group project and I was the only one doing slides.

Today, I finally watered Gerald and noticed something under the pot. A little folded paper. His handwriting.

"If you ever read this, I'm sorry I wasn't brave enough."

Dated the week he stopped answering.

So he knew. He knew the whole time. He just chose silence over honesty.

I'm not crying about the breakup anymore. I'm crying because he understood exactly how much he was hurting me.

And he still left the plant to do the talking.