I do not know why I cannot let you go,
when you are everything I promised I would never choose.
You carry every warning sign I know,
every kind of love I swore I would refuse.

We have almost nothing in common,
and somehow, we are painfully the same.
Two chameleons changing with the room,
shifting colors just to hear someone say our name.

We learned how to become what others needed,
how to bend before they ever asked us to.
Desperate to be wanted, to be chosen,
to make ourselves enough for someone new.

But you became controlling beneath the charm,
arrogance disguised as certainty and grace.
Careless with the hearts you held too loosely,
always keeping one more option in its place.

You cheated truth before you cheated trust.
You played your games and called them circumstance.
Indecision became another weapon,
keeping me suspended in the hope of chance.

And I know what loving you would cost me.

I would have to soften every boundary,
silence pieces of myself you could not bear.
I would have to shrink to fit your expectations,
change my shape until I disappeared in there.

I refuse.

I have spent too many years becoming
someone I can finally recognize.
I will not trade the woman I have fought for
just to become pleasing to your eyes.

So tell me why my heart still reaches backward.

Why does logic lose its voice when memory speaks?
Why can one remembered moment resurrect you
after I have spent whole months becoming free?

Maybe I do not miss you.

Maybe I miss who I became beside you.
The version of myself who felt enough.
The way you listened like my words were sacred,
the way your attention masqueraded as love.

You made me feel seen
in places I had hidden.

You made me feel chosen
before you made me disappear.

And maybe that is why the wound stays open:
you gave me everything I wanted most to hear.

Then you lied.

You left.

You erased me
with astonishing precision.

As though I had been nothing
but a temporary decision.

And that is what I cannot reconcile.

How someone can memorize the smallest parts of you,
hold your secrets like they matter,
build a future out of careful words,
then walk away
as though there was never anything to shatter.

The cruelest part is knowing
you already knew.

While I was falling,
you were calculating the landing.

While I was building something permanent,
you were already planning your abandoning.

You had an ending
hidden in your pocket
while I was still believing in the start.

And I was foolish enough
to call your architecture fate
while you were quietly designing
how to break my heart.

I hate that I believed you.

I hate that somewhere underneath the anger,
there is still tenderness I cannot kill.

I hate that knowing exactly who you are
has never taught my heart
how not to want you still.

Because you are everything I do not want.

And somehow,
you became the thing
I cannot forget.

A contradiction
wearing the face of a memory.

A lesson
I understand completely
and have not learned yet.

Perhaps that is our final similarity:

Two chameleons
desperate to be loved.

Only I am finally learning
that love should never require
changing color
until no trace of you
remains.