Have You Ever Loved Somebody?
By Olivia Salter
Word Count: 4012
The morning she saw him again, the sky was the color of bruises—lavender smudged with gray, swollen and full of something unsaid. Arielle stood on the porch of her mother’s worn-down house in Atlanta's Fulton County, her coffee cooling in the breeze, her mind still caught in the hangover of an old dream. Anthony.
It had been years. Five, to be exact. But time didn’t erase people like him. It only deepened the groove they left in you. The kind of mark that wasn't loud or gaping, but quiet and aching—like a scar that still itched when it rained.
Her mother’s wind chimes clinked gently behind her, brittle with rust and memory. Arielle took another sip of the bitter brew, wincing. Everything in this place tasted of memory—cheap coffee, porch swings, heartache. And he was back in town. Of course he was.
She heard about it at the hair salon two days ago—between the smell of flat irons, scalp oil, and gossip floating like incense. “Girl, Anthony Evans is back,” one of the stylists said, lips glossed, eyes lit with the spark of remembered crushes. There was a hum in the room after that, like the moment before lightning touches down.
Arielle didn’t flinch. Didn’t blink. Just folded her hands in her lap. But her stomach? It flipped like it used to when he said her name. She kept her face still, the way her mama taught her. “Don’t let nobody see you shake,” her mother always said. But inside, the floor had shifted.
Anthony Evans. The boy who kissed her neck under the bleachers and promised her forever. The man who walked away without saying goodbye. Now he was back—less than ten miles away. And she was still trying to decide if her heart was brave—or just dumb.
She leaned against the porch railing, eyes scanning the sleepy street where cicadas hummed and kids pedaled too fast down cracked sidewalks. There was something about the air—it smelled like cut grass and maybe, just maybe, the edge of a decision. What did it mean, that he returned right as spring began to bloom? That she’d started dreaming about him again before she even knew he was home?
The breeze tugged at her locs, brushing them across her cheek like a whisper. Her phone buzzed on the porch railing. A text from her cousin Shonda: You heard from Anthony yet? Girl, don’t act like you ain’t curious.
Arielle locked the screen without replying. She wasn’t about to confess what she felt—not to Shonda, not to anyone. She didn’t even have the words. All she had was a body that remembered. And a heart that hadn't stopped listening for his footsteps.
Maybe she’d run into him at Kroger. Maybe she wouldn’t. But the wanting? That had already bloomed. Hot. Stupid. Familiar.
And deep down, she knew: Anthony Evans didn’t just walk back into town. He walked back into her bloodstream.
Back then, everything felt like summer. Not just the season—but the feeling of it. The soft ache of golden hours, the way light stretched long over sidewalks, and the hum of cicadas whispering promises you didn’t yet know would break. That was the year Arielle met Anthony—junior year, the year the world tilted slightly, quietly, without anyone noticing.
He arrived in the middle of October, when the leaves burned red and orange but the air still held onto warmth like a last breath. A transfer student from some city up north, with eyes that looked like they belonged in a sad song and a mouth that rarely smiled unless he meant it. Mysterious. Not in the cliché way. Anthony didn’t try to be noticed—he just was. Like static in the air. Like the part of a dream you wake up from and try to get back to.
He walked like he had secrets. Like he was already halfway out the door. But when he looked at you, really looked, it was as if the whole world quieted down just to listen.
Arielle was quiet too, but in a different way. The kind of quiet that noticed everything. She memorized the way people tapped their pencils when nervous or how teachers’ voices cracked when they were sad. She didn’t speak unless there was something worth saying. But Anthony? He made silence feel like a shared language.
He noticed her. Not in the way boys sometimes notice girls, all shallow glances and empty words—but like he saw the storm beneath her skin. Like he was listening for the sound of her thoughts. One afternoon he passed her a note in English class, folded neatly like origami. You look like you know where the stars go when they disappear. She didn’t answer. Just smiled.
They started walking home together. Talking about things no one else seemed to care about—fears, dreams, ghost stories, music that hurt too good. She told him about her father who left, and he told her about his mother who cried behind locked doors. Their hands brushed once in the dark. He didn’t pull away.
He wrote her poems—bad ones, mostly, full of crooked metaphors and awkward rhymes. But Arielle kept them, each one, folded in her diary like pressed flowers. Proof of something that once bloomed.
The first time he kissed her, it was behind the school, by the rusted swings that hadn’t creaked in years. The sky was bruised with dusk, and the air held that moment in its teeth. His lips were soft but unsure, like he was scared she might vanish. And in that moment, something unraveled in her. Something wild. Something alive. It was terrifying. It was wonderful.
She believed him when he whispered, “I’ve never felt this way before.” Believed him when he looked into her and said, “You’re the only one.”
She shouldn’t have.
Because even then—even when the world was sweeter—there were shadows forming at the edges. The kind you don’t notice until they’ve already swallowed the light.
He broke her in increments. Not with violence. Not even with cruelty. But with a carelessness so quiet it was almost tender. Like forgetting to water a plant he swore he loved. Like silence after a song you didn’t know meant something to you. It was the way he’d look at her and then through her, his mind somewhere else—somewhere freer, somewhere she didn’t exist.
She wasn’t sure when it started. Maybe it was the first time he called her by another girl's name and laughed it off. Or when he stopped asking how her day went. When "we" became "I" and "I" became absence. There were other girls, of course. Whispers in hallways. Perfume she didn’t wear on his hoodie. Half-smiles exchanged with women who didn’t know her name—and didn't need to.
He gave just enough to keep her from leaving. A hand on the small of her back. Late-night calls when his world crumbled. The way he held her like she was oxygen, even as he learned to breathe without her.
She stayed. Too long. Longer than her pride wanted, longer than her friends advised. Because once, he had cried in her lap, body shaking, whispering, “My mama never loved me right.” And she’d believed, foolishly, that if she loved him hard enough, loud enough, right enough—she could rewrite his past.
But love doesn’t rewrite people. It doesn’t fill in the hollowed-out places they refuse to touch.
She wasn’t enough. Not for his brokenness. Not for his yearning for everything except stillness.
And when he left—moved cities like it was a casual change of scenery, like she was just another backdrop—he didn’t say goodbye. Not properly. Just a text that said, "Take care, always."
As if he hadn’t once promised forever.
It felt like someone had cut her open and walked away from the wound. And in the quiet that followed, she learned the cruelest thing wasn’t the leaving.
It was the fact that he had started letting go long before she ever realized she was holding on alone.
Years passed like pages in a book she wasn’t sure she wanted to finish. Arielle graduated college with honors, her name called in a stadium echoing with cheers that didn’t quite reach her heart. She became a teacher, poured her energy into molding young minds, into helping her students feel seen in ways she never quite had. She returned home not because she had to, but because something in her still wanted to rewrite the story from the beginning.
She dated kind men. Gentle, respectful, predictable. Men who opened car doors, texted back, remembered birthdays. Safe ones. The kind you’re supposed to want.
But none of them sparked the fire Anthony once did—and none of them burned her to ash, either.
Then, on a quiet Sunday morning when the sky was the color of cold milk, she wandered into Kroger to pick up lemons and oat milk. She was reaching for a bag of oranges when a voice, low and familiar, sliced through the hum of grocery store chatter like a song she hadn’t realized she still remembered.
“Ari.”
She froze.
He stood at the end of the produce aisle, holding a bunch of cilantro, looking at her like the years had never passed. His smile hadn't aged, but his eyes—those had changed. There was something quieter in them now. Less of the wild boy who once made her feel infinite and more of the man he’d become in her absence.
Her hand trembled. The bag of oranges slipped from her fingers, scattering across the linoleum like startled thoughts.
He knelt without hesitation, gathering the fruit. His fingers brushed hers, and a rush of memory bloomed in her chest—late-night car rides, whispered promises, the weight of his hoodie on her shoulders.
“I’ve been thinking about you,” he said, looking up at her. “For years.”
Her breath snagged somewhere between hope and warning.
She wanted to believe him. God, she wanted to believe that the boy who once broke her heart open like a window in a storm had become the man who could now close it gently, without shattering anything.
But memory has sharp teeth.
She remembered what it felt like to lie awake wondering why love had to hurt. Remembered the silence after their last argument, the way he walked away like she was just another door he didn’t want to open anymore. Remembered how she had to learn to stand up straight again without his arms around her.
“People change,” he said, as if reading her thoughts. “I’m not who I was. I hope… neither are you.”
She smiled, but it didn’t quite reach her eyes.
“No,” she said softly. “I’m not.”
Because scars don’t fade just because someone says they’re sorry.
They fade because you learn to wear them like armor.
And even now, when the world is quieter and her life more whole, some part of her still remembers the sound of breaking.
And how long it took her to stop blaming herself for it.
They talked for hours in the Kroger parking lot, the night thick around them, quiet except for the occasional thrum of an engine passing by. They leaned on her car like they were teenagers again—like time hadn’t carved out a thousand days, a thousand silences, a thousand goodbyes between them. Arielle's breath clouded in the chill air, and Anthony’s jacket smelled faintly of sawdust and cologne, of sweat and something that tugged at memory.
Anthony looked older now. A little more worn at the edges, like a page too often turned. His beard had filled in with streaks of silver, and his eyes—those eyes—held something quieter. Tired, maybe. But still deep. Still familiar. Still dangerous.
His voice curled around her like smoke, smooth and slow. "I've been back a few months," he said. "Working construction. Helping my cousin get his business off the ground. Just trying to rebuild, you know?"
"Rebuild what?" she asked, not even knowing where the question had come from.
"Myself." He looked down, then back up at her, gaze steady. "I had to. I was... a mess before. I know that now."
Then, softer: “I think about you. All the time.”
The words landed heavy in the space between them, heavier than the humidity in the Southern night air. Arielle's mouth parted, but the words she wanted—Don’t, or You lost that right—dissolved somewhere behind her teeth, too raw to reach daylight.
So instead, she asked, “Why now?”
Anthony shrugged, shoved his hands in his pockets. “Because I couldn’t get you out of me.”
And the way he looked at her—like she was the only thing not blurred in the rearview mirror—made something inside her flicker. Something she thought she’d buried.
And that’s how it started again. With old ghosts and new words. With memory and maybe.
They met for coffee the next morning, sitting across from each other at the corner table in the café where she used to grade papers after school. He ordered her drink without asking—oat milk, one sugar, extra cinnamon—and she hated how much that still touched her.
Then dinner. Then walks around the lake trail where they used to go after Sunday brunch. Slowly, like breath returning after a long hold, it began to feel like something was waking up between them.
Anthony told her he’d been going to therapy. That he was learning to sit with things. His pain. His shame. His choices. “I know I hurt you,” he said one night, voice low, eyes fixed on the gravel. “I don’t want to be that man again. I’m not.”
She studied his profile, the curve of his jaw in the streetlight, the way his hands fidgeted. She didn’t say anything at first. Because what did you say to someone who shattered you, then came back holding glue?
But when he brought her sunflowers the next week—bright and tall and defiant—he said, “Not roses. Too easy. You’re more like these. Strong. Resilient. Not fragile.”
She laughed, despite herself. And the way he looked at her in that moment—like he had waited a lifetime just to hear her laugh—knocked the air out of her chest.
He asked about her students. Her favorite novels. What music made her cry lately. He didn’t interrupt. He didn’t dominate. He listened. Or at least, he seemed to.
But underneath it all, in the place she rarely looked, there was a whisper behind her ribs: Don’t forget. It didn’t shout. It didn’t scold. It just… waited. A quiet echo of the girl who once cried herself to sleep in the silence he left behind.
Still, Arielle let herself want. Let herself hope. She cracked the door open to the possibility that maybe, just maybe, people could change. That maybe love could learn how to come back better.
Some nights, they sat in his truck, the dashboard lights dim and warm, old R&B drifting like a heartbeat. He’d press his forehead to hers, palms resting on her thighs, and whisper, “I got it wrong before. I won’t get it wrong again.”
And for a while, that promise was enough. Enough to hush the whisper. Enough to believe.
But hope, she knew, was a match. And all it takes is a gust of truth to snuff it out.
But love doesn’t live on promises alone.
At first, it was little things. The dates he canceled last minute with vague excuses—“work stuff,” “traffic’s insane,” “rain check?”—stacked like unattended mail. The calls grew fewer, shorter. Texts turned from full sentences into half-hearted emojis. She tried not to notice. Tried to rationalize. Everyone gets busy. Maybe he just needs space. But silence isn’t space. Silence is absence. And absence, she was learning, is its own kind of answer.
When she asked—carefully, gently—he’d sigh like she’d just ruined everything. Like her desire for clarity was sabotage.
“You’re overthinking. Don’t mess this up, Ari.”
There it was again. That script he knew by heart, and she, unfortunately, had once memorized. His tone was smooth, practiced. Not cruel—no, he was too polished for cruelty—but sharp enough to make her bleed inside. And the moment she began to doubt herself, he knew he had her. Just like before.
It wasn’t a breakup. It was a slow unraveling. A steady ghosting that wore human clothes. And the worst part? He still held her hand in public. Still called her “baby” in front of his friends. Still looked at her like she was the only one in the room—when he wanted to. But in the quiet moments, in the unlit corners of their relationship, there was a coldness he couldn’t quite disguise.
One night, he dropped her off and didn’t walk her to the door. No kiss. No lingering touch. Just a casual wave through the window like she was a neighbor, or worse—a stranger. She stood there for a beat too long, the porch light flickering behind her like a warning.
Her heart thudded like thunder against her ribs. It was as if her body understood something before her mind did.
It was happening again.
The forgetting. The withdrawing. The way he faded like the last few bars of a love song she used to dance to.
She didn’t cry—not then. She just stood on that porch, hands clenched, breath caught, staring at the space his car used to be.
And for the first time in weeks, she didn’t reach for her phone. Didn’t send a follow-up. Didn’t chase him down.
Because somewhere deep inside, the fog was lifting.
She found out from a cousin—an accidental text meant for someone else, followed by an awkward phone call filled with too much stammering. Anthony had been seeing someone else. A girl who worked at the local bar. Twenty-three. No baggage. No history of shared trauma. No late-night talks about trust issues and childhood wounds. Just a blank canvas he could paint over with lies he hadn't recycled yet.
Arielle sat with it for a full day, nausea curling in her stomach like spoiled milk. The pieces clicked together too easily: the sudden distance, the unanswered texts, the nights he claimed he was “figuring things out.” She had believed him—believed that people could change, especially when they swore they would.
When she confronted him, he didn’t even flinch.
“It’s not like we were official,” he said, leaning against the kitchen counter, arms crossed like a man too comfortable in his own cowardice.
Her voice trembled, but it held. “You told me you wanted to fix what you broke.”
He looked away, almost like he was bored. “I meant it. In the moment.”
There it was again. Moment. That word he used like a shield and a shovel—shielding himself from accountability, burying everything they had shared.
As if love lived in the heat of a glance or the brush of a hand, and not in the quiet, unglamorous work of showing up. Every day. Especially when it was hard.
She stood there, hands clenched, pulse thudding in her throat. Small. Furious. Done.
“You know what?” she whispered, her voice steadier now. “You don’t love anybody. You just like being wanted.”
He laughed—bitter and careless, a sound with no weight behind it. “You’re still so dramatic, Ari.”
But she didn’t flinch either. Didn’t cry. Not then.
She just turned, grabbed her keys, and walked out of his apartment with the same dignity she walked in with. It wasn’t revenge. It wasn’t a statement. It was survival.
And this time—this time—she didn’t look
Weeks passed. Then months.
There was no dramatic epiphany, no thunderclap of closure—just the slow, deliberate unfolding of space. Space between thoughts of him. Space between the ache and the acceptance. Space she could finally fill with herself.
She deleted his number. Not in anger, but as an act of clarity. She blocked his socials—because healing required silence, not surveillance. She even burned the old poems tucked inside her nightstand drawer. Not because she hated him, but because she was done preserving pain like it was something sacred.
It wasn’t about revenge. It never had been.
Healing looked nothing like the movies. It looked like peace—quiet and unassuming. Like making breakfast on a soft Sunday morning, flipping pancakes while sunlight spilled across the kitchen tiles. Like reading a book and getting lost in it, not flipping the page just to distract herself. Like laughing too loud with her friends over wine, not apologizing for taking up space. Like walking past the spot where he used to pick her up and realizing—her chest didn’t tighten. Her breath didn’t catch. Her heart didn’t reach for what no longer reached back.
It wasn’t perfect. Some days still stung. Some songs still hurt. But she stopped checking his last seen. Stopped wondering if he ever regretted letting her go. She realized that wasn’t the point.
She didn’t stop loving him all at once. Love doesn’t disappear like that. It dissolves slowly, like sugar in coffee—bittersweet until it’s gone.
But in that slow unraveling, she found something sacred.
You can love someone deeply and still decide they are not worthy of you.
She had always believed love was about holding on. Now she knew—it was just as powerful to let go.
Months later, spring unfolded in soft pinks and golds, and Ari found herself back in that same Kroger parking lot, now with a different rhythm in her chest. She wasn’t rushing. She wasn’t bracing. The air was kind, the sky wide and forgiving.
She spotted him before he noticed her—alone, slumped on the curb outside the automatic doors, head bowed, fingers raking through his hair like he was trying to untangle a life that had unraveled. His jeans were faded now, frayed at the knees. There was a crumpled receipt in one hand, a nearly-empty bottle of Mountain Dew in the other.
He looked up, blinking as if pulled from some internal static, and his eyes met hers. Recognition hit his face like a slap.
“Ari,” he called. His voice cracked in that familiar way, the way it used to when he tried to lie gently.
She stopped. Just for a second. Long enough to let the past settle without weight.
“I’m good,” she said, her tone soft but unshakable. “I hope you find what you’re looking for.”
And she meant it. There was no malice, no residual ache—only a quiet truth she’d earned.
He opened his mouth, maybe to apologize, maybe to reach backward. But Ari had already turned.
She walked away, the sidewalk firm beneath her sandals, the breeze lifting the hem of her dress like a whisper of freedom. The sun poured over her shoulders, warm and golden.
Her heart was whole. Not because someone else had come to heal it, but because she finally had.
And behind her, the past stayed seated on the curb, no longer invited to follow.
Have You Ever Loved Somebody?
Yes.
And sometimes, loving them means leaving them. Not because the love wasn’t real. Not because the moments weren’t magic. But because staying meant shrinking. Because loving them started to mean forgetting yourself—your laughter, your light, your wholeness.
There comes a time when your heart whispers truths you’ve tried to silence: that peace is not found in walking on eggshells, that love should not taste like sacrifice every single day.
Sometimes, the greatest act of love is choosing yourself. Not out of bitterness, but out of grace. Not because you stopped loving them, but because you finally started loving you. To love somebody deeply is one thing. To realize that love should never come at the cost of your soul is everything.
So yes. I have loved somebody, and I walked away. And in that leaving, I came back to life.
