No one should ask me how to explain it.
There are no diagrams for this kind of soul-bond. No instruction manual for the way two spirits recognize each other before memory even kicks in. He was there before. Before the bruises. Before the edges got sharp. Before I learned how to armor up and shut down. He was there in the beginning—when my heart was still learning to beat without fear.
Back when I was soft.
When I still believed love wasn’t something that needed to be earned.
Back when the sky still looked big enough for dreams.
He was my first companion through the wormhole we call life. The better half of my whole. Not some cliché soulmate story—this wasn’t that neat. It was messier. Realer. It had seasons of laughter, of distance, of silence loud enough to crack glass. He was the one who held my hand when I hated the world. When I wanted nothing more than to disappear, he stayed. Said nothing, just… stayed.
He was there when I said, “Let’s do this thing.” Life. The chaos. The pain. All of it.
And he was also there when I let him go.
Not because I wanted to.
Because he told himself a lie so big it swallowed the future we could’ve had. A lie dressed in fear. He wasn’t ready to grow up, and I wasn’t willing to stay small.
Still, through the years, while the noise of others came and went—the ones who claimed to care, the ones who vanished when I needed them most—he checked in. Quietly. Unobtrusively. Like clockwork. A signal from the other side of the timeline that not everything was lost. That some people really do remember your soul.
I never talked about him.
Not once.
You wouldn’t know his name. You wouldn’t even know to ask.
Because you were too busy stepping over me—mistaking me for something fragile, or worse, forgettable. You never saw what was stitched behind my silence. You never felt the flames I swallowed just to feed you warmth.
I am the dark empath.
I walk alone with a heart that remembers everything.
And the joke’s on you.
It was always him.
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