Two

Raegan woke before the alarm. Again.

It wasn’t the abrupt jolt of anxiety that pulled her from sleep, but the slow awareness that morning had arrived and she was already tired of it. She lay still in the dark, eyes open, staring at the faint outline of the ceiling fan above her as it cut lazy circles through the shadows. The apartment was quiet in that early, suspended way. No traffic yet, no neighbors stirring, just the low hum of the refrigerator and the sound of breathing beside her.

Owen was still asleep, his back turned toward her, shoulders rising and falling in a heavy, rhythmic pattern. He took up space easily, like someone who felt entitled to rest. She watched him for a moment, studying the familiar slope of his spine, the way his arm hung loosely off the edge of the mattress. She wondered if it made her a bad person that she didn’t reach out to touch him. That the thought didn’t even occur to her until the guilt followed it.

They hadn’t kissed goodnight in three days.

They hadn’t fought, either. That was the strangest part. No shouting matches that left her shaking. No tears soaking into pillows. No doors slammed hard enough to rattle the walls. Just a slow, dull silence that settled between them and refused to lift. Like two people coexisting in the same space, each quietly mourning a version of the other that no longer existed. Or maybe mourning themselves.

Raegan carefully slid out of bed, moving slowly so the mattress wouldn’t creak. She didn’t want to wake him. Not because she was being considerate, but because she didn’t want to explain why she was already leaving the room. She padded into the kitchen, the cool floor grounding her, and flipped on the coffee pot.

This was her ritual. The one thing that still belonged entirely to her.

She loved the way the smell of coffee filled the apartment, rich and sharp, cutting through the stale quiet. It reminded her she was still here. Still alive. Still capable of doing something intentional. She poured herself a mug and fixed it exactly the way she liked it: strong, a splash of oat milk, two sugars stirred until dissolved. Small choices mattered more these days.

She sat at the kitchen table wearing one of Owen’s old t-shirts, knees pulled up, watching steam curl from her mug. Morning light crept through the window, pale and tentative. She wondered when their love had become something that only lived in photos. Frozen smiles. Arms wrapped around each other for the sake of memory. Proof that at one point, this had meant something.

Their home was filled with evidence of a life. Framed prints on the walls they never talked about anymore. A junk drawer full of old movie stubs and takeout menus. Mismatched mugs they picked out together at a flea market, laughing about how they didn’t match anything else. But none of it felt like hers now. It all felt like props. She was acting in a life she didn’t remember auditioning for, delivering lines she hadn’t written.

The worst part wasn’t the loneliness.

It was that she had learned to expect it.

She had stopped asking for more, stopped articulating her needs because they always seemed to land somewhere between inconvenience and indifference. She couldn’t remember the last time she wrote a poem, or shared a secret just for the thrill of being known. She couldn’t remember the last time a conversation left her buzzing instead of exhausted. Everything with Owen had become polite. Predictable. Empty.

He wandered into the kitchen a few minutes later, still half-asleep. His hair stuck up in odd places, his eyes puffy and unfocused.

“Morning,” he said, grabbing a mug without looking at her.

“Morning,” she replied.

And that was it.

They stood beside each other in silence, sipping coffee like co-workers waiting for a meeting to start. He scrolled through his phone, thumb moving automatically. She watched the sky outside the window shift from blue to gold, the day stretching open without her.

There was a time when he used to kiss her shoulder and say things like, You’re my favorite part of the morning. Back when mornings felt like beginnings instead of obligations. Now he said nothing. And she had stopped hoping he would.

Raegan left before he could ask about her plans for the day. Not that he ever did. She grabbed her keys, pulled on a hoodie, and headed down the stairs, heart pounding with an urgency she couldn’t name. She didn’t have a destination in mind—just the undeniable urge to be anywhere else.

She ended up at the park down the street, sitting on a splintered bench beneath a crooked tree. The wood was rough beneath her hands, grounding her in a way the apartment never did. She used to come here to write. Once, she’d spent an entire afternoon sketching strangers and writing poems about their imagined lives. Lovers meeting for the first time. People leaving. People beginning again.

She wondered if any of them were still out there, living stories she hadn’t finished.

Raegan pulled out her phone and opened her Notes app. The cursor blinked at her, patient and expectant. For a moment, she hesitated, fingers hovering. Then she typed:

This is not love, not the kind I dreamed of.

This is staying quiet to keep someone from leaving.

This is setting myself on fire just to light the way for them.

She stopped, heart racing. Her throat tightened. It wasn’t much. It wasn’t polished or gentle or safe. But it was hers.

For the first time in a long time, she wrote without editing. Without apologizing. Without worrying if she sounded too dramatic or too sensitive or too much. She didn’t think about Owen. She didn’t think about the future or the logistics or the fear waiting for her back home.

She just wrote.