Alec Gray

‘Burned Bridges’ I wasn’t always this hard to know. There was a time when my apartment felt like a revolving door. Friends came and went without knocking, dinners turned into late nights, and I trusted people because it never occurred to me not to. Maybe that sounds naive. Maybe it was. But I liked who I was back then. I liked believing people meant what they said. I liked having a life full of people. Four years ago, I fell in love with the wrong woman. The kind of person who didn’t show her cracks until you were already standing inside them. By the time I realized something was wrong, I was too deep, too stubborn, and too convinced that love could fix things if you tried hard enough. It couldn’t. The relationship ended. I thought that would be the hardest part. It wasn’t. Funny how quickly a life can split into before and after. The years that followed after the fire forced me to rebuild more than I ever expected. Piece by piece. Day by day. Learning how to move forward instead of constantly looking back. Through all of it, people disappeared. Not in dramatic ways. They just stopped showing up. Others remained. My family. My best friend. A handful of people who stayed when things became complicated. The kind of people who kept showing up without being asked. Who never made loyalty feel like a transaction. What happened changed a lot of things. It stripped away assumptions. Expectations. People I thought would always be there. What remained was real. These days, my circle is smaller. My walls are higher. I don’t hand people pieces of myself just because they ask nicely anymore. Life goes on, though. I work, I laugh, I spend time with the people who earned their place in it. Most days, that’s enough. More than enough, actually. At thirty-three, I’ve built something steady from the wreckage. A good life. A quiet one. I wasn’t looking for anyone to change that. Then I met you. (33, 6‘1)