I'm sorry,
Rayine

Rayine,

I don't have a good excuse. I started writing one three times and every version came out sounding like a reason — and you never needed reasons. You needed me.

You needed me, and I wasn't there. Not because I stopped caring, but because I let everything else get louder than you. By the time I looked up, you had already taught yourself how to carry it alone. That's the part I can't sit comfortably with: that you got used to doing it without me.

You told me you felt alone in this. I heard it — I even said the right things back — but I don't think I actually sat with it. I kept answering a question you weren't asking. You didn't want me to fix anything or promise anything; you wanted me to notice, and noticing was the one thing I never made time for.

That's on me. Not the distance, not how busy I let things get. Me.

I'm sorry for the calls I cut short. For every time I said later and let later become never. For making you feel like something on my list instead of the reason there was a list at all.

You never asked for much. Time. Presence. The two easiest things in the world to give, and those are exactly the two I got wrong.

And I need to say the other thing too. You were patient with me far longer than you had to be. You made room for my silences and my half-answers and never once held them over me. You were kind at the end, when you didn't owe me a single kind thing — you even thanked me on your way out, which says more about who you are than anything I could put on this page.

Thank you. Not the polite kind of thank you. The kind you say when someone gave you something they were never obligated to give.

I'm not asking you to be okay with it. I'm not asking you to be soft about it either. I just want you to know that I see it clearly now — all of it — and I would rather spend my time proving it than explaining it.

There's one more page. Turn it.

— yours, still, and sorrier than this page can hold