She promised me she would be there when the world turned its back. That she would be my reason to keep smiling, the hand I could hold when I couldn’t stand on my own. She said she would be there, and I believed her. Maybe that was my first mistake — believing in permanence in a world where nothing really stays. And then one day, she was gone. No storm, no fight, no shattering moment that I could point to and say, there — that’s where it broke. Just a message. A few words that read like a verdict: “I don’t want to be with you anymore.” That was it. That was all I got. I’ve replayed it a thousand times since. Maybe I wasn’t good enough. Maybe I made her feel small. Maybe I didn’t love her the way she wanted to be loved. I will never know. The truth lives only with her, and she is no longer mine to ask. So I am left with the maybes. Maybe it was me. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe there’s a version of me, somewhere in some other life, who was enough for her to stay. But this version — the one sitting here now — will never find out. For the rest of my life, I will be that maybe. The question mark she chose to erase, the almost that never became.