A Love I Wouldn't Wish On Anyone

It’s almost 4 a.m. and nothing has happened. Not one goddamn thing. He’s out there in his truck like he’s on a different planet, sleeping like a baby while I sit in my shed with my hands raw from tearing apart a closet I swore I was only going to clean.

My shed is cold—colder than the house—and every breath comes out as a small white cloud that disappears in an instant, because the air won’t hold anything here. Not heat. Not hope. Not the tiny things that used to make mornings mean anything.

I told myself I wouldn’t reach out tonight. I wasn’t going to. I was done feeding him the oxygen he uses to keep his own head afloat while mine starts to sink. But then I thought I heard something and asked him if he heard it too.

As I was going through the footage to see what the noise was, I saw the flashing light. I asked him about that too.
Of course I tried to make him care about one stupid blinking light in the woods, because in my chest it felt like a test:
Would he notice me?
Would he come check?
Would he look at me and say, “It’s nothing, babe,” and then stay?

As I sat in my shed, watching his phone screen from my laptop, I waited for his reply. I didn’t tell him I was watching.
I didn’t tell him that watching his screen is my way of still doing the thing that used to be normal between us—paying attention.

I saw him watch the video, inspect it longer than I expected. For a second, I let myself breathe.
Maybe.
Maybe this time.

Then Crunchyroll opened like a hand slamming down a lid. Anime running full-screen while I sat in my shed and watched the light on my screen go blue.
He didn’t come check the woods.
He didn’t come back here and tell me it was nothing.
He didn’t come back and sit and breathe with me.

He just clicked away from what I had sent him and disappeared into someone else’s cartoon universe like I wasn’t even a noise to be heard.

I went from numb to boiling in the span of two seconds. I felt stupid for hoping.
I felt like I’d been holding my breath for years, waiting for a man to finally notice the way I do the small, stupid things that mean I’m still here.

I’d already said what needed to be said. I’d already laid it all out in a long, detailed text—not for him, but for me.
A line in the sand I needed to make real, to stop myself from crossing it again just because it’s easier. Because it’s familiar.

I told him:
“Do you fucking hear yourself? Like do you at all?
This is your mess to fix, not mine.
My silence is anger waiting for my husband to show the fuck up… knowing that it’s a fucking waste of time because you never will.”

And I told myself:
This time I don’t fold.

He read it.
And I watched it happen—watched his phone screen shift and pause and flicker and glow.

And instead of softening, instead of owning anything, he skimmed it for places he could defend himself instead of places he could be accountable.

This all happened after he got home from work.
4:30 like clockwork.
Walked in, gave me my soda, gave me a kiss that felt like obligation, and disappeared.
He went to let the dogs out and then sat in his truck for thirty goddamn minutes playing games on his phone before he came back to pretend like he was going to sit with me.

He wasn’t here to stay—he was offering his absence as a gift.

He said, “If you want me to go, I’ll go.”
I said, “Didn’t seem like you wanted to be here since it took you long enough to come.”
He threw back, “This is why I didn’t rush back here.”

And he left.
Again.

That leaving takes a piece of me with him each time.
It’s not only the door closing. It’s the way my whole body feels like someone cut off the heat in the dead of winter.
I get cold physically—like he took the heat with him.

And then my brain starts spinning through every single time he’s chosen the exit over the effort.

Except—he didn’t used to.

Every time we would fight and I’d burst into tears, I would run to the bathroom and lock myself in.
I hated to cry in front of anyone.
And he knew that.

So he would sit on the other side of the door, even when I would scream at him to go away, to leave me alone.
He would sit there—sometimes quiet, just so I knew he was there.
And other times, he would talk me down.
Remind me of things.
Make me feel so wanted and loved I could cry all over again.

Back then, he worked second shift. Didn’t get off until 11:30 at night.
I’d be in bed, barely awake, and I’d text him: “10 mins, my love.”
And he’d send back, “9.”

We’d count down every minute.
Every fucking one.
Until he was on his way home to me.
Until he was mine again.

And the book this morning. That stupid, beautiful book.
The kind of book he calls my smut books.
But this one—it ignited something within me.

It wasn’t just sex.
It was this deep, soul-bending, instinctual connection.

A man who faked his death for the woman he loved.
A woman who recognized him by the way he carried himself before her eyes could even focus.

It wasn’t the plot.
It was the pull.

I had that once.

We hadn’t spoken in months—after one of our worst fights. I thought it was over. Like he’d just fallen off the planet.
And then one night, in the middle of all that aching loneliness, I looked down at my phone.
His name.
His message.
“I miss you.”

No excuses. No apology.
Just three words that shattered me.

I told him I missed him too.
That I hated him.
That I loved him.
All of it, in one breath.

And he came for me.

But instead of taking me back to his house, he drove until I could smell salt and hear waves.
The beach. My place.
The place I go when I need to breathe.

There are nights that live in me like a video I keep rewinding.

We were at the pool hall. We fought. Screamed all the way home.
I think I almost got us in a wreck. I don’t remember the fight—I just remember the moment he stopped yelling.
Looked at me.
And took me.

On the hood of the car.
Then the porch.
On a janky OSB table he’d built that left splinters in my ass cheeks.

And afterward—he didn’t just go to sleep.
He helped me to bed.
Sat behind me.
Pulled every splinter out.
Rubbed lotion on the raw spots.
Blew on them like they were burns.

And then he just held me.

That was the last time I remember feeling chosen.
Not wanted like a passing thought.
Chosen.

Nights where he was not the enemy but the only person who could make the hurt stop.

Those memories are the proof that it ever existed.
That’s what keeps me from walking.
That’s what keeps me thawing out every time I go cold.

But now?

Now it’s silence that’s loud.
It’s the kind of quiet where the walls press in and make my throat close.

Days without a text that used to feel like a knife now make me do a shrug.
That’s the damage.
The normalizing of absence.

I begged for a year for him to show up—not in the passive “you’re home in the same building” way, but in the way those nights used to prove:
Choosing me.
Fighting for me.
Showing me I’m not a fixture.

He didn’t.

He didn’t even move when I put the line down and hit send.
He sat in his truck like storm-chasing weather, thinking he could wait the clouds out rather than pick up the broom and sweep me back into the middle of our house.

The therapy session I’ll never forget.
The new guy we tried because the old shit wasn’t working.

We sat there and he asked us to name the things we loved about each other.
Three things.
Simple, ordinary things.

I could have listed them in my sleep—the dumb soft stuff and the fierce stuff.

I rattled mine off and it felt like a knife when his brain groped for answers the way a drunk hands around for a light switch.
It was like watching a person reach for a part of themselves that had been cut out.

He fumbled. He struggled.

I almost cried right there in front of them both, but I held myself together.
I hid my true feelings once again because I’d promised to try.

That session lives in my head not because it happened tonight, but because it sits like its own timestamp in the long list of “how long has this been going on.”

It’s a marker.
A month ago, we tried and he looked lost.
Tonight? Tonight, I watched him choose cartoons.

So I tore my closet apart.

Not a little clean—the whole goddamn thing.
Took everything down.
Pushed the shelves out.
Felt the splinters snag the skin between my fingers, dust flying like tiny ghosts.

There’s something about ripping a space open to the studs that makes the chest thing a little quieter.

If I stay busy enough—if I fill my hands with real work—maybe the waiting will lose its hold.

Better to cough up drywall dust than sit and let his silence suffocate me.

I remember the first time we moved in together and how everything felt like a promise.
The tools smelled like oil, metal, and honesty I could depend on.

I hammered until my knuckles bruised.
Cut until my fingers ached.

Building something with my hands is the only time I don’t feel like I’m begging for scraps.
The saw hums and the problem becomes something you can measure—not a person who refuses to notice you.

There’s a sick, stupid part of me that wanted him to come out of that truck and be furious at me.
To know that his leaving had consequences he couldn’t scroll away.
I wanted him to feel the weight of the words I sent.

Instead he skimmed them. Looked for blame. For holes. For places to say, “You’re making this about me.”

He made me the villain the way he always has when I let the truth out. Because truth forces him to look inward, and he’d rather flail than feel.

Watching his phone screen while he read it was the real crack.
Not the leaving. Not the cold.

But seeing him hold my words like they were a grenade to toss back at me instead of a map back to us.

That’s when something in me snapped in a way that won’t fit back together the same.

I thought of running.

Not like walking away in a dramatic slow-motion kind of way.
But the small ones.

Leaving for a night to a friend’s house.
Going to a motel.
Staying on a stranger’s sofa until the urge to scream softened.

I thought about the night I spent at the other man’s house once, when my world was on fire.
And he washed my hair and let me stand under hot water until the day fell off my shoulders.

I thought of that shower—where someone I hardly knew held me without asking.

Those ten minutes still live like a bright coin in the pocket of my memory.

It’s not that he fixed me.
It’s that he offered care without strings.
He let me exist.

That is a memory like medicine.
And tonight, I drank that memory until it was a dull ache and some kind of relief.

I love him.
And I will always love him.

That’s not a weakness; it’s a fact I hold like a gospel, even when I’m mad as hell.

But loving someone is not the same as making them the center of everything they refuse to tend.

I could make a list of everything I’ve done to keep this place upright:
— The nights I stayed awake waiting for him to come home.
— The arguments I swallowed because the fight would break everything.
— The things I fixed.
— The money I stretched.
— The way I taught our son better manners because somebody had to.
— The ways I kept trying to teach a grown-ass man how to be human.

I could list them, and he’d still find a way to make it sound like I’m the problem.

Tonight, with sawdust under my nails and cold in my ribcage, I don’t know what comes next.

Maybe he’ll wake up tomorrow and choke on his own cowardice and claw his way back in.
Maybe he’ll keep doing what he does—choose comfort over confrontation, cartoons over conversation, the truck over the bed.
Maybe this is the night that swells into a shape and stays for good.

Maybe that’s terrifying.
And maybe I’ll learn how to live with him like we’re roommates instead of corpses of lovers.
Maybe I’ll keep rebuilding closets and porches and fences.
And some night, I’ll build a whole life that doesn’t need him to validate it.

Either way, I know what it feels like deep in my bones when the person who once worshipped everything about you chooses the easy exit again and again.

I know the particular pain that settles in your chest like a rock—a rock you carry in silence until one day it crushes you flat.

So I keep the list.
I keep the memories that show it was real once: the beach, the Civic, the porch table, the evenings where he fought for me—and after, fought with me, and then made it right.
I keep those nights like reminders.
I keep the memory of the shower that wasn’t from him like a small, private miracle that taught me I can be held.

Tonight I’m bloody with dust and exhaustion and a rawness that won’t be soothed by anything but time and an answer.

He can wait out the storm in his truck until it’s over.
He can decide he’d rather sleep like a baby than share the weight.
He can choose what he chooses.

And I’ll be here with my hands full of screws and my throat full of words.

Loving someone enough to do everything for them and never feeling that same love back—
I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.

Because it’s enough to bury a person alive.