Have You Ever

  We lived in a world of mismatched schedules, fleeting interactions, and unaligned desires. My partner, Daniel, was steady—a man of quiet patience and predictable rhythm. His dark eyes, always thoughtful, rarely betrayed emotion outright. He had a reassuring presence, the kind that grounded you in a storm, but he also carried an unshakeable stillness, a reluctance to chase chaos or spontaneity. I, on the other hand, thrived in movement. There was always a restless energy humming beneath my skin, an urgency for connection that often left me feeling like I was reaching for something just out of grasp. My laughter came easily, but so did my longing. The imbalance between us—his passivity, my intensity—slowly became more pronounced, like a fracture deepening beneath the surface. At first, it was just physical—a quiet indulgence that filled an unmet craving. But desire has a way of weaving itself into something more insidious. What began as mere escapism morphed into something resem...

  Last summer, I found myself wrapped up in something that felt exciting—something that felt right. I had been crushing on him for a while, and when we finally started seeing each other, it was like stepping into a daydream. There was a little voice in the back of my mind, though—nagging, questioning. I knew he had been with someone else before me, and even though he reassured me that they had ended things, something inside me hesitated. Still, I silenced that doubt. I wanted to believe him. Summer passed in a blur of moments with him, fleeting but full of energy. Then he moved to Johannesburg for work. We hadn’t put a label on anything, but I thought we still had something—something unspoken but understood. I believed that whatever we had wasn’t completely over. Until one day, at work, I casually opened Instagram—and there it was. A picture of him and her. Not just together but  living together . In Sandton. In an instant, everything unraveled. The doubt I had pushed aside...