Convenient

It always starts the same.

Not with an ending,

but with a thinning.

Words once poured like rain

now fall in scattered drops,

hesitant, measured,

like they’ve already decided to stop.

Replies shrink into fragments,

half-thoughts, half-effort,

sent without weight.

You reread them anyway,

searching for something

that used to live there.

Warmth, maybe,

or proof you weren’t just passing time.

Conversations die young now,

cut off before they learn how to breathe.

You sit with the echo of what almost was,

while somewhere else

they continue, unchanged, unbothered,

as if you were never

part of the rhythm at all.

That’s when you understand the

role you played:

a placeholder in their absence,

a stand-in for someone who didn’t stay,

a momentary fix

for a deeper emptiness

you were never meant to fill.

Easy to pick up,

easier to put down.

But they always come back.

They return like nothing broke,

like nothing ended,

carrying the same words

that once meant everything

and now mean just enough.

Because they know

you won’t turn them away.

You never do.

Not because you don’t see it,

but because part of you

still waits,

still hopes

that one time

it might be different.

They want something to fill the space.

You want to be the space they choose.

So you meet in the middle,

where need pretends to be meaning,

and attention pretends to be care.

Over and over,

you give pieces of yourself

to someone

who only knows how to borrow.

And you learn to live with it.

Not because it hurts less,

but because it hurts the same

every single time.

Predictable.

Familiar.

Almost comforting

in the worst way.

Because in the end,

you’ve come to understand

what you are to them.

Not love,

not loss,

not even memory.

Just something easy

to reach for

when everything else

falls out of their hands.

Convenient.