Almost Right
They never called it love.
That was the unspoken agreement. Names made things heavier, and neither of them wanted to drop anything fragile.
They met the way so many people do now, not in a room but in a pause. A comment, a reply, a recognition that landed softly. He wrote like someone who noticed the weather. She read like someone who listened between lines. It was enough to begin.
At first, he felt distant in the safest way. A voice that arrived when she needed it, never demanding space in her life. She liked that. Liked that he existed just beyond reach, where she could keep him intact. A good thing, she knew, could be ruined by proximity.
She told herself he might not be real. Not fully. Maybe he was something she assembled out of loneliness and timing and her own capacity to hope. A soft place to land at the end of a day that asked too much. If that were true, there would be no danger. She could keep him at arm’s length and call it wisdom.
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