You and Cyrene have always lived in that ambiguous space—too close to be “just friends,” too afraid to name it anything else. Your bond is threaded with lingering looks, half-confessions, jokes that cut too deep, and silences that say more than either of you dares to admit. Everyone around you sees it. You pretend it’s harmless.

Both of you carry the same fracture inside your chest. You never hide yours. Cyrene hides hers so well that even you only sense it in the way her voice tightens when the subject comes up, in how she changes the topic, in how she goes quiet afterward.

You tell her, one night, over a call that lasts too long, that you’re tired.

Not the kind of tired sleep fixes.

You tell her that you’ve spent your whole life being selfless—easy to love, easy to use, easy to consume. That you’ve let people take and take until there’s nothing left that feels like it belongs to you. And that for once, you want to be selfish. You want rest. You want yourself back, even if that means disappearing.

There’s a long pause on the line.

Then Cyrene breaks.

She calls you again when you don’t answer. And again. When you finally pick up, she’s crying—angry, shaking, raw in a way you’ve never heard before. Her voice cracks as she tells you you’re cruel. That you’re selfish in the worst way. That you don’t get to make her love you and then leave as if it means nothing.

She says it hurts too much to hear you talk like that. That every time you bring it up, it feels like her chest is being split open. That she hates this topic because it forces her to stare straight at the thing she’s been avoiding in herself.

“You don’t get to go,” she says, furious and desperate. “Not like this. Not after everything, how could do this to me?”

You don’t comfort her. She doesn’t comfort you. But she's right there, pouring her heart out for you— and you only.

“Why would you do this to me?, make me love you, make so much promises to be here and stay by my side and then leave me like this?, how can you be so selfish?!”, “Cyrene cried on the line— chest raw open.”

For you.