Sorry You Couldn't Stay

There is grief here. It is not the kind that asks for anything back.

Sorrow and regret look identical from the outside.

Both pause at the same doorway.
Both carry the weight of what is no longer here.

But sorrow faces forward. It holds what happened without needing it to have happened differently.

The body aches, and the ache is clean.

Regret faces backward.
It reopens the decision,
searches for the seam where things could have turned.
The body aches, and the ache loops.
It replays.

It renegotiates with a room that has already emptied.

The difference does not surface while the body is still moving.

And most people never stop long enough to find out which one
they are actually carrying.

Walking is not the opposite of grieving.

It is what grief looks like when it has finished negotiating.

I am sorry you could not stay.

That is not a correction. It is not an invitation to return.
It does not reopen anything.

It means exactly what it says.

And I kept walking — not because the leaving didn't land,
but because standing still in someone else's absence is not loyalty.

It is abandoning yourself in the exact spot where someone else already did.

The goodbye is real.

It does not need to be understood to be complete.