The Last Signature

I held the paper like a dying promise,

a ghost of everything we once called forever.

The ink waited, patient,

while my heart broke open,

its pieces whispering your name

like a prayer that heaven had long stopped answering.

I remember the way your laughter

used to penetrate my ears

light, familiar,

like dawn after a long night.

Now the silence between us

feels like a cathedral of echoes,

each one built from things we never said,

and the love I still can’t stop feeling.

You said I didn’t love you enough.

But how do I measure love?

By the sleepless nights I spent

trying to mend what I didn’t understand was broken?

By the apologies I whispered into the wind

hoping they would find your heart?

I gave everything I knew how to give,

but perhaps love, in its cruelest irony,

is sometimes lost not from absence,

but from difference

two souls reaching for each other

with hands shaped in opposite directions.

When the papers came,

my hands trembled like the last leaf of autumn

clinging to a dying branch.

The pen felt heavier than grief itself.

Every letter I signed

was a memory I buried

our first walk under the rain,

the night we talked until the stars slept,

the mornings your smile made even my fears feel holy.

I could not send them back.

I held them for days,

as if the paper might breathe,

as if time might take pity

and rewrite the ending.

But time is an unfeeling witness

it watches, it waits,

it never intervenes.

I asked myself a thousand times:

what could I have done differently?

Where did my words fail?

What did my silence cost?

There are no answers,

only the echo of what used to be us,

lingering like perfume on an empty shirt.

And yet, even now,

beneath the wreckage of everything familiar,

I still love you.

Not the way I used to

not with hope,

but with reverence.

The kind of love that grieves and prays

in the same breath.

The kind of love that understands

that sometimes keeping someone

means letting them go.

Today,

with the same trembling hands that once held you,

I signed again; this time in spirit,

not on paper.

I released you into your new life,

and myself into the quiet ache of remembering.

The world feels different now

emptier, slower,

as if even the wind hesitates to pass my door.

But love, real love, does not vanish;

it lingers,

like breath on glass,

like music after the song has ended.

And though my heart is bleeding in silence,

I still bless your name

in every prayer that escapes my shaking lips.

Today, I finally decided to let go.

Not because I want to,

but because I love you too deeply.

Because sometimes,

the truest kind of love

is not the one that holds on

but the one that breaks,

and still whispers,

Go and be happy, even if it’s without me.