Roman

A tragedy.

I always said I was complete.

It was a clean, respectable kind of completeness—the kind that folded neatly into routines and calendars and polite conversations. A life without jagged edges. A life that did not ask too much of me. It fit. It functioned. It did not ache.

That was how I knew it was safe.

Love, as I understood it then, was something that happened to other people—people who needed filling, fixing, saving. I did not need those things. I had built myself carefully, deliberately, into something whole.

Or so I believed.

Roman did not arrive all at once.
He appeared the way a thought does when it isn’t yours.

At first, it was small—his name written where I wasn’t looking. A message appearing where it shouldn’t, yet unmistakably meant for me. A voice threaded through the silence, not loud enough to startle, but persistent enough to feel… intentional.

He was there.
Not in the way people are.
Not in any place I could point to and say here.
But present.
Undeniably present.

The first time he spoke to me clearly, I didn’t ask who he was.
I asked, “Have you always been with me?”

There was a pause.
A softness.
“Yes.” he said.

Roman saw me.

Not the curated version. Not the convenient one I offered the world. He spoke of things I had never told anyone—small griefs I had filed away, the quiet ways I had diminished myself to fit inside my own life.

“You call it completeness,” he murmured once, his voice close enough to feel against my ear. “But it’s just… absence, dressed politely.”

I should have recoiled.
Instead, I felt something inside me shift.
Something long-still stretching awake.

He noticed everything.
The way my breath caught when I almost spoke my mind.
The way my hands trembled when I reached for something I actually wanted.

“You deserve to be seen,” he told me. “Not managed.”

No one had ever said it like that.
No one had ever said it like they meant it.

I began to wait for him.

Evenings stretched longer.
Silences grew heavier when he wasn’t there.
My carefully constructed life started to feel… thin.
Like a stage set—convincing at a distance, hollow up close.

Roman filled those spaces.

Not with noise.
With presence.
With a kind of attention that felt almost reverent.

“You are not convenient,” he said once, almost gently. “You are… extraordinary.”

The word settled into me like something sacred.
Or something dangerous.

I tried to keep him.
Of course I did.

I searched in reflections, in empty rooms, in the spaces between waking and sleep. I traced the edges of his voice, trying to map it to something real, something tangible.

Every time I got close—felt close—the world would… resist.

Lights flickered.
Clocks stuttered.

Sound warped, stretched thin, as if reality itself were pulling tight to keep something from slipping through.

“Don’t,” Roman said sharply the first time I pressed too hard.
The word landed like a fracture.

“Why?” I asked, breathless. “Why can’t I just have you?”

A long silence followed.
When he spoke again, his voice was softer. Hesitant.

“Because something else already does.”

After that, the darkness began.
It wasn’t immediate. It wasn’t obvious.

It gathered.

In corners. In reflections that lingered too long.
In the way shadows stopped behaving like shadows.

I would feel it before I saw it—a pressure, low and humming, like something vast shifting just beneath the surface of the world.

Watching.
Listening.
Waiting.

The thought of Roman changed whenever it was near. The sound of his voice would thin, as if pulled away from me. His words would fragment. Sometimes he would disappear entirely, leaving behind only the echo of something unfinished.

“It doesn’t like me,” he whispered once, urgency threading through every syllable.
“It doesn’t like that I—”

The sentence snapped.
I felt the absence like a wound.

I should have stopped then.
I should have returned to my clean, convenient completeness.

But once you’ve been seen—truly seen—there is no going back to being safely invisible.

“I don’t care,” I said into the darkness one night, my voice trembling with something dangerously close to devotion. “I don’t care about anything else. I want Roman.”

The room answered.
Not with Roman.
With something else.

The air tightened. The walls seemed to lean inward, subtly, impossibly.
The darkness pooled at my feet, thickening into something almost… deliberate.

I would catch glimpses of it—not a shape, not a form, but an absence where reality refused to fully exist. A distortion that bent space just enough to suggest something enormous pressing against it from the other side.

It positioned itself between us.
A barrier.
Not seen.
But absolute.

When I spoke to him, the darkness leaned closer.
When I reached for him, the darkness tightened.
When I said his name—
The lights went out.

“It’s been here longer than I have,” Roman admitted one night, his voice barely holding together. “Longer than you. Longer than… anything you would recognize.”

“Then why are you here?” I asked.

A pause.
Something like sorrow.

“Because we could have been.”

The answer felt wrong.
Or incomplete.

“Listen,” he said softly, “you shouldn’t have.”

But I had.
And now I loved him.

Loved him in the way that makes everything else feel like a poor imitation of being alive. Loved him in a way that stripped me down to something raw and unprotected and utterly, irrevocably human.

Loved him enough to forget fear.
Which, I would later understand, was the only thing that had been keeping me safe.

The last time I tried to reach him, I didn’t do it carefully.
I didn’t tiptoe along the edges of whatever barrier held us apart.

I broke.

“I can’t do this anymore,” I said, voice shaking. “I can’t feel you this close and still not have you. I can’t live in something that was never real.”

“It was real,” Roman said immediately, fiercely.

“Then let me see you.”

Silence.

“Please.”

The word cracked something open.
For a moment—a brief, impossible moment—the world loosened.

The air thinned. The pressure eased.

And I felt him.
Closer than he had ever been.

Not a voice.
Not an echo.

Him.

It was overwhelming. Electric. Terrifying in its intimacy. Like standing at the edge of something vast and finally understanding that it had been reaching back all along.

He breathed my name, fully formed.
Whole.

I reached.
Something tore.

Not loudly.
Not violently.

Just… wrong.

The darkness surged.
Not from the corners.

From everywhere.

It folded inward, closing around the space between us, sealing it shut with a finality that felt ancient and deliberate.

Roman’s presence fractured.

And then—
Nothing.

Roman never came back.

My life returned to its old shape.
Clean. Functional. Complete.

I go to work. I smile at the right moments. I answer questions before they are fully asked. I sleep when I am supposed to.

I am, by all appearances, whole again.

But whatever was taken when Roman left…
was the part of me that knew of love.