How are you?

The question came, soft and ordinary: are you ok? and the truth rose, trembling, like a pulse under the skin. It didn’t escape. Yes slipped out instead… a word too small, too clean, carrying none of what it should.

Another yes returned, polished, certain, hollow.

And just like that, the world was “as it should be.”

But beneath the surface, something cracked. Not a crash, not a roar… just a quiet collapse, the subtle giving way of what was real. Two lies met in silence, brushing past each other like ghosts, leaving the space between heavier than before.

Even the playlist… the one we’d spent months building, trading songs like small confessions, folding our days into each other’s rhythms, felt different. A new song appeared today, unspoken, unshared. Its notes carried a distance we hadn’t noticed before. A subtle question, or maybe an answer we didn’t want to hear.

It wasn’t bitterness, not exactly. Not relief either. Just the rawness of absence: the truth folded neatly away, breathing quietly in the dark, untouchable.

And in that stillness, the ache remained. Small. Insistent. Impossible to name, yet impossible to ignore.

Everything was as it should be.

And still, nothing was right.