Did you love me or did you only love me with the light on?

I wonder sometimes whether you loved me or the lighting.

Because there was a version of me you met on a very specific evening, in a very specific setting, at a very specific angle where the candle hit my collarbone and a moment when a stranger in your city came up to me for a photograph instead of you, and I laughed at something you said that wasn’t that funny, but I wanted you to feel like it was. And I think you fell for that. For the angle. For the laugh. For the glow. For the woman who could make you feel effortless in a room full of effort.

I wonder if you ever loved the version who stood in the kitchen at 4 a.m. with unwashed hair and looked at you quietly, desperately, as you’d slur the meanest words. The one who went quiet for three days and couldn’t explain why. The one whose sadness didn’t photograph well.

Because you loved me loudly when the lamp was on. When I was dressed. When I told the story well at the dinner party. When I wore the thing you liked and laughed at the right volume, as if I were some damsel you’d discovered, not a person you were supposed to be learning together with.

But when the lamp went off. When the room was just us, the silence, and the version of me that doesn’t perform. You’d reach for your phone. You’d say you were tired. You’d roll to your side of the bed like the mattress had a border I couldn’t cross.

I started keeping track.

Not on paper. In my body. In the way I noticed which version of me earned your attention and which version made you disappear into yourself. The put-together one got your hand on the small of my back. The messy one got your shoulder turned three degrees away. Not enough to call it rejection. Just enough to teach me which draft of myself you were subscribing to.

I edited accordingly.

I wore the thing more often. I told the story better. I laughed at the volume you liked. I kept the lamp on longer than I needed to because the light made you stay and the dark made you distant, and I was so busy performing the version you chose that I didn’t notice I’d stopped being a person and started being a venue.

You loved the venue. I’m almost sure of that. You loved the atmosphere. The music. The way the evening felt when I was curating it for you.

There’s a part I keep leaving out. I was building something that year. Quietly, the way I build most things. Early mornings, late screens, the kind of work that doesn’t look like work because it happens in the hours no one sees. And you wanted to be the thing I was building toward. I understand that now. You wanted to be the empire, not the person standing next to the woman constructing one. But I was trying to love you the only way I knew how, which was to not need you to save me. I had watched too many women hand their foundations to men and then stand in the rubble when they left. So I built my own. Not to exclude you. To protect you from becoming my structure, because I had seen what happens when the structure leaves, and I loved you too much to make you load-bearing. You read that as distance. I meant it as mercy. And neither of us knew how to say that, so we just let the silence fill the space where the conversation should have been.

But did you love the woman who locked herself in the bathroom and sat on the floor with the fan on because she needed four hours of not being watched? Did you love the one who flinched when you raised your voice, not because you were yelling but because someone before you had, and her body never learned the difference? Did you love the one who cried in the car on the way home during a fight and couldn’t say why because the why was buried under twenty years of things she still hasn’t unpacked?

I don’t know and never will. And that’s the cruelest part. Not that the answer might be no. But that I will never get to hear it said clearly enough to stop wondering.

You didn’t leave with cruelty. You left with ambiguity. Which is worse. Cruelty gives you something to push against. Ambiguity gives you a room with no walls and tells you to find the door.

I’m still looking for the door.

Some mornings I wake up, and I’m certain you loved me. I think of every time we cried, having to say bye until next time, not knowing when the next time would be. The way you put your jacket on the chair next to mine, like you were saving my place, even when I was already sitting in it. The way you once said my name in your sleep. Not a sentence. Just my name. Like even unconscious, you were checking that I was there.

Those mornings, I am sure.

Other mornings I remember how you introduced me at parties. The way you’d list what I did before you’d say who I was. A résumé. A brochure. As if the most important things about me were the ones that sounded impressive to strangers. As if loving me and being impressed by me were the same thing, and you’d never learned the difference.

I pour my coffee on those mornings, and I stand at the counter, and I think: he loved a well-lit version of a woman who was dark in the places that mattered. And he never asked to see the dark. He just kept adjusting the lamp.

There’s a shelf in my apartment where I keep things that have no practical use. A ticket stub. A receipt from a dinner I can’t remember the food from, but I remember what you said. A photograph where you’re not looking at the camera and I am, and my face in that photo is the face of a woman who believes she is loved and hasn’t yet started to wonder.

I keep it because I want proof. Not of your love. Of my belief. I want to remember what it felt like before the question arrived. Before I started sorting every memory into two categories: evidence he loved me and evidence he loved what I provided. Before I turned our entire history into a courtroom and appointed myself both prosecutor and defense, and asked a jury of my own insecurities to deliver a verdict they are not qualified to give.

The verdict never comes. That’s what no one tells you about this particular kind of heartbreak. It doesn’t resolve. It doesn’t scar over. It just sits there, open, like a book left facedown on a table. You can’t finish it because the author left before writing the ending. And you can’t close it because closing it means choosing an answer, and both answers cost you something.

If he loved you, then you lost something real, and the grief is legitimate, and you are allowed to miss him without shame.

If he didn’t, then you spent time performing for an audience of one who was only ever watching the show, and the grief is different but not smaller, because what you lost wasn’t him. It was the time you spent being someone you thought he wanted instead of someone you actually were.

I don’t know which one is true.

I make my coffee. I open the blinds. I stand in the light, not because it makes me look any particular way, but because it’s morning and that’s what you do with blinds in the morning. And I carry the question with me the way I carry most things. Quietly. Without resolution. With the understanding that some doors don’t open from the inside and some people don’t hand you the answer, and you have to build a life that is beautiful anyway, even with the question still sitting on the counter next to the coffee, unanswered, taking up space, refusing to leave.

I let it stay.

Not because I’m strong. Because I don’t know what else to do with a question that has no answer except to let it live in my house and learn to walk around it without tripping.

Most days, I don’t trip.

Some days the light hits the apartment at a very specific angle, and I think of the restaurant and the candle and the collarbone and the laugh, and I wonder whether that was the last time I was fully loved or just the first time I was fully performing.