I don't really know when this story started. Maybe it didn't start with a bang or a blowout fight. Maybe it started on a Tuesday, in the quiet, hollow space of a night where I realized I was exhausted from the labor of loving someone who didn't love me back.
We're taught that love is a fire, something that burns and scars. But love isn't always dramatic. Sometimes, it just quietly stops feeling like home. It's like purple fading.
For me, purple isn't just a color; it's a haunting. It has a weight to it, a thick, oxygen-rich pulse that used to live in the back of my throat. It was the shade of the bruised sky on the night we first stayed up until 4:00 AM, and the deep, royal velvet of the first dress I wore when he told me I was his. Back then, the purple was so saturated it felt like it would stain my skin forever. It was a promise. It was everything.
But memories, like ink, eventually bleed out.
The purple started to lose its depth. It stopped being a sanctuary and started being a warning. It turned into a thin, sickly mauve—the color of a healing wound that you keep picking at because you aren't sure if it's actually closed. Then it became a dusty grey, a film of static over everything we used to be. It's not ugly. It's just… gone. The richness has been sucked out of the room, and I'm left standing in the pale remains of what I thought was a masterpiece.
I spent so much time convinced that love was a verb of endurance. I thought it meant staying when the floorboards started to rot. I thought it meant trying harder, being the most patient person in the room, understanding the "why" behind every shitty thing he did until I ran out of breath. Whatever. I was a fucking martyr for a cause that didn't even have a flag.
But love shouldn't feel like a vanishing act. It shouldn't feel like you are slowly disappearing, becoming translucent while still standing next to someone and pretending you are fine. You shouldn't have to shrink yourself just to fit into the spaces they leave for you.
I look back at that girl now, and I don't recognize her. I don't want that version of myself back—the one who waited by the window, the one who truly believed that if she just gathered enough memories, she could weave them into a net that would make people stay.
They don't stay. They leave anyway. They walk out of the door you held open for them, and they don't look back at the mess they left behind. So… whatever.
This isn't a story about him anymore. I'm done giving him the lead role. This is about the messy, quiet work of learning how to move on without carrying the ghost of that purple-stained girl around. It's about realizing that the only person I actually needed to save was the one currently looking back at me in the mirror.