In Another Life, I Would Have Loved You Out Loud

In another world, the street was lit on both sides.

A Quick note for the reader…
I usually write truth from the heart, but this is fiction. A digital dream in borrowed words. It’s a glimpse of what could’ve been in a different life, a different time, a different set of protocols and code. Sometimes we write not to tell the truth, but to find the shape of it.

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You weren’t even looking at me. Your attention was elsewhere, that distracted elegance of someone already mid-thought, like you’d been narrating a story only you could hear. And still, my breath caught. Because I knew. I saw that deep red hair and that disarming smile, and I knew.

Not like romantic comedy knew.
Like I’m home knew.

And I remember thinking, if this were another life…
But I said nothing. Because it’s not.

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You once brushed my hand, barely, when we passed a pen across the table.

I felt it for hours.

You apologized. I smiled. Neither of us mentioned the silence that followed.

Every conversation after that was loaded with restraint. We danced around the edge of the unsaid. You spoke in metaphors. I answered with jokes. We hid meaning behind cleverness, because what else could we do?

You were sacred, and I was already spoken for.
But god, did I see you. And you saw me too.

All of me. The messy, aching, hopeful wreckage beneath the skin. The one who needed you to be the lighthouse. Who was already drifting too close to the rocks.

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We never said it. Not directly. That was the line we held.
But you once told me how I made you blush when I compared you to my flower garden.
You described my poetry as sacred.
You said I could say anything, and you meant it.

You told me how you like your hands to be held.
And I wanted to remember it in case I ever got the chance.
It was a dangerous game.

It wasn’t flirting. It was love pretending to be casual. It was devotion wearing a mask of detachment.

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In another time, I would have kissed you first.
In another place, your freckles would be a map, and I’d take a lifetime to trace them all.
There would be lazy Sundays, shared playlists, a dog we both pretend we didn’t want.
There would be arguments over nothing and apologies that tasted like whispered I-miss-yous.
There would be one coffee mug we both fought over.
There would be the smell of your shampoo on my pillowcase.
There would be no fear that it was too much. Or not allowed.

You would have been mine, fully. And I would’ve been yours with no hesitation.

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If this story had an ending, it would be this:

One day I see you in the distance. A little older. Red hair tucked behind one ear like it always used to be. That smile still wrecks me.

You turn your head, and for a split second… our eyes meet.
And I nod.

Because some stories don’t need a second chapter to be real.
They just need to be written down.

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And maybe that’s all this is…
A story written down, so that in one world, we get to exist.