𝗟𝗜𝗧𝗘𝗥𝗔𝗥𝗬: "But Leaving Is" by Irish M. Sanchez

 Published by: Athena Nicole Palatino

Date Published: October 10, 2025

Time Published: 4:10 PM

Category: Prose

Theme: Staying becomes a habit when love teaches you to want less and accept less until leaving feels like losing yourself.

I wanted to end it the way you end a bad habit. Not because I wanted to hurt him, but because I couldn't keep hurting myself for the sake of pretending everything was salvageable. I thought I had learned how to breathe beside someone. I thought windows could stay open. I believed, for the first time in a long while, that air would come freely. I trusted that the air would not turn into smoke in my lungs. 

I pictured myself sitting across from him at the small table where we ate our meals and making it simple: "This is over." No pleading. Just truth, finally spoken without apology. Before that, I wrote. Like I always do. I filled pages with everything I had been told to swallow: the late replies, the private laughs that weren't for me, and the excuses that smelled like other people. I wrote the facts because my memory had been gaslit into doubt. The facts were steadier than my shaking voice.

I gave him a list of dates and times he had promised and failed to deliver. There were times I warned him it would hurt, but he still did it anyway. I folded the paper into the shape of an aircraft until my hands gave up folding it, and I watched it lie on my desk until the afternoon light changed. I'm sure it looked like a remnant of the person I once was.

I wanted to leave while he was watching TV. I wanted to let him find the apartment empty enough to feel my absence. I wanted him to look at the space we shared and know the window was closed because I closed it, not because he finally opened up.

But I also wanted him to see me do it. I wanted him to witness me walking out and realize he'd given me this decision. I wanted him to feel the burden of his indifference reflected back at him when my footsteps disappeared into the hallway. I wanted him to realize. I wanted him to finally understand that he'd forced me out the door.

When the night came, I thought I already had the courage to leave him be. I crumbled on the edge of the bed, near the door, holding onto my dear life with my phone by my side. I typed longer messages I wanted to send. Paused, I erased them. The simplest sentence I could manage to send slipped out of my hand: "I can't do this anymore." 

I didn't need to explain why in that exact moment because he already knew. I had said it before. I had said enough. 

But plans don't always survive the gravity of what they are meant to leave behind. I stayed because leaving seemed out of the question. I stayed because the prospect of being alone with nothing but the sound of my own rage seemed intolerable. I stayed because leaving meant that it was truly over. I wasn't ready. I don't think I'll ever be truly ready to have the finality of that reality destroy me.

And when I wanted to end it—truly end it—something colder than courage kept me rooted. It wasn't loyalty. It was fear. Fear that I'd be wrong. Fear that leaving would prove I'd been foolish to hope. Fear that the silence after him would be louder than the betrayal itself. So I stayed.

I wanted to leave without a fight, and yet the familiar weight of us held me like a magnet.

It's hard to explain the shame of staying. The shame isn't just about the betrayal. It's about how his refusal to choose me made me choose to stay anyway. It's the way I learned to train myself to want less so that less would not feel like too much. The shame made me smaller until staying felt like the only possible identity left. 

So I stayed. I sat in the apartment that smelled faintly of him and learned to live with the misery of suffocating . I practiced breathing again, counting breaths like a ritual, hoping one day the air wouldn't sting. I told myself that planning the ending had already made me stronger—that someday I would find the courage to execute it. For now, the plan sat folded in my pocket.

Maybe the day I finally walk out I will not scream. Maybe I will only close the door and inhale until my chest remembers what clean air feels like. That is how I want it to end: with me breathing, whole enough to know I have not wasted my life on someone who chose to smoke over the window he opened for me.