I built a place in me for her—long before I knew her name. Stone by stone, silence by silence, I shaped the waiting like a cathedral and called it hope.

But she never arrived. Or maybe she did—wearing someone else’s voice, someone else’s wounds. And I missed her while trying to recognize a dream too fragile to survive translation.

I left lights on in every room of my soul. I wrote invitations in every breath. I made my anger polite, my sadness poetic, my chaos a story with structure. Still—no one came.

I listened to other men speak of women who ruined them with beauty. I envied them. To be ruined is at least to be touched. I have been weathered only by absence.

I have loved the outlines of possibility so long, I forgot how to touch something real without comparing it to what never was.

So bury it here. Bury the myth. The girl who would understand without asking, who would lean in without testing, who would see me without scanning for threats I didn’t create.

Let the dream rot back into the soil. Let the chapel collapse under its own loneliness. Let the quiet finally mean nothing except silence.

And if she ever comes—late, weathered, wrong key in hand—let her find nothing waiting. Not out of cruelty. But mercy. Because I’ve already grieved the life we never had.