The Mathematics of Uneven Love

I've become fluent in the language of your leaving-
Each goodbye a different shade of incomplete,
Each promise a currency you spend like water, Each return a smaller fraction of before.

You hollow me out like I'm endless depths,
Carving spaces that can't be filled.
I watch you claim each piece I offer,
Then leave it roadside, unwanted, stilled.

Your promises unfold like crystal flowers,
Fragile mirages that catch false light.
You root them in the depths of my conviction,
Knowing dawn will shatter them to dust.

You architect these towers of possibility,
Build them tall with "maybe" and "someday,"
Then stand back to watch me climb,
Knowing that the foundation's made of clay.

How carefully you measure every summit,
From which to cast my delicate hopes,
Orchestrating elegant devastation-
An architect of perfect ruins.

Tell me- is there satisfaction
In watching someone's world contract
To the size of your text messages,
To the space between call and callback?

Do you keep a ledger somewhere,
Of all the hearts you've balanced,
Subtracting love from every column
Until the numbers favor silence?

I've become a scholar of your absence,
Studying the negative spaces you leave,
Trying to understand the physics of how
One soul can hold what two believe.

The asymmetry of it all haunts me-
How I forge memories from moments
You've already forgotten, how I can burn
While you don't even feel the flame.

You move through rooms I've made sacred,
Stepping over scattered pieces of my faith,
Treating holy ground like common earth,
While I'm still kneeling in your wake.

Is there a mathematical formula
For the inverse relationship between
What I give and what you take,
What I feel and what you mean?

I keep carving formulas in my bones,
Plotting the orbit of your escape,
But every answer I derive just proves
That some questions prefer to remain.

How do you sleep beneath the weight
of all these half-kept promises,
While I lay awake accounting for
Every word you said you didn't mean?

Some say everything must land somewhere,
Nothing vanishes without a trace-
Then why does all this longing live in me
While you floated untethered, unbothered away?

I've measured the distance between
Your actions and your alibis,
Calculated the circumference of excuses,
Graphed the trajectory of goodbye.

Yet here I stay, marking time
In the language of aftermath,
Learning new names for broken
While my foolish heart keeps asking:

How can this moment mean
Everything to me and nothing to you?
How can you walk away carrying pieces
Of me and never feel their weight?

The only constant in this equation
Is the certainty of my uncertainty,
The steady rhythm of my questioning,
The endless math of loving unequally.