You ever try to hold water in your hands?

No matter how tightly you press your palms together, it always finds a way to slip through. That’s what love felt like with him. Like I was trying so hard to hold on to something that was always meant to fall away. And when it did… I blamed myself. Thought maybe I wasn’t enough. That if I smiled bigger, danced longer, kissed softer—maybe he’d stay.

But love doesn’t work like that, does it, Harold?

You’re still cupping your hands. Still dripping.

She’s right there, breathing under the big top. Painted face, trained smile, dead eyes. And you look at her like you’re searching for something that was buried years ago—before the circus, before the snatched childhood, before she learned the kind of love that bites the hand that feeds it.

You miss the girl who reached for your fingers. But she’s not reaching anymore.

And she shouldn’t.

Because she’s free now, Harold. Not happy—no, Way doesn’t deal in happy—but free from you. Free from the weight of your guilt. And here you are, building a life around someone who isn’t reaching back.

I know that life. I lived it.

Muerte and I were beautiful in a fractured-glass kind of way. Catch the right light, and it looked like love. Catch the wrong one, and it’d cut you to pieces. We called it passion. Called it destiny. But it was just gravity pulling two broken things together, crashing harder every time.

Until I stood up and walked away.

And here’s the thing, Harold—letting go didn’t kill me. It saved me.

It let me breathe.

You say you want her back, but what you really want is to stop drowning. You’re not trying to save her—you’re trying to use her to save yourself. But she’s not a life raft.

You think if you fight hard enough, she’ll come home. That this is some noble crusade. But love that demands proof, love that chases, that begs, that bleeds—it’s not love. It’s need.

And Harold, she doesn’t need you.

I remember thinking that walking away from him meant erasing part of myself. Like I’d be empty without the pain. But the pain was the anchor. The weight that kept me down. And when I let it go, I didn’t lose something.

I found something.

I found me.

That’s why I’m here now, standing beside him—not in longing, not in regret, but in truth. Because we earned these titles by knowing who we are when the dust settles. We carry them not for what we lost, but for what we became when we stopped breaking ourselves for people who couldn’t hold us.

You still break, Harold. Still ache.

And I get it. I do.

But love isn’t about chains or blood or battles won.

Sometimes, love is choosing to leave.

Sometimes, love is letting go.

Because love doesn’t always return.

Some of us learn to live with that.

And others?

We learn to let go, even if the echoes never stop.

I’ve loved and I’ve lost, Harold.

But my heart will go on.