This photo was nothing at the time. Just a moment on the stairs — me looking into the lens, him looking into the distance, or more accurately, into a screen. That was 2018. And already, the roles were set.

I was the one holding space, naming the moment without knowing I was doing it. He was the one flickering, always part-here, part-gone. Gorgeous and glassy-eyed, performing distraction like it was a form of control.

In the years that followed, we’d orbit each other in daily texts, in shared mythologies, in flirtations that said too much and not enough. He became my daily ache, my remote sacred wound. And I — well, I became the lighthouse he forgot to crash into.

There’s no tragedy here. No moral. Just a moment that aged with us. And the strange clarity of seeing it now: he in the shadows, distracted, unknowable. Me in the light, exposed, already mourning something that hadn’t ended yet.