The sun cried on the hood of my car as we cruised through the hills of our suburban neighborhood. The music was loud, but my thoughts were louder as each moment of her silence dug deeper into me. I opened my mouth to speak, but hesitated at the realization that nothing I was thinking could be good enough to say in this moment. I raised my coffee to my lips, like a mother raises a pacifier to a baby to stop them from crying; hoping that the sweet taste would stop the words from tumbling out, stop me from saying something stupid like “I love you.”

Ten silencing sips later, and three skipped songs because I couldn’t bear listen to them with her next to me, she cleared her throat and began to speak.

“I’m sorry about last night.” This was all she said for a moment, as if she couldn’t quite think of what to follow it with. Eventually she started again, hesitating a little after each thought. “I shouldn’t have just been silent. I just wasn’t quite sure what to say. No one has ever confessed that to me, that I am all they think about. I guess I thought, with all the time we spend together, that that wouldn’t be something you would hide from me. I just was surprised I guess. I didn’t know what to say.”

The clouds in front of us were dusted with pink as the sun slid down the side of the sky, running for the horizon. Part of me wanted to disappear with it, taking all the light with me, so I didn’t have to live in this moment. But as the sun melted away, I was still here, driving the winding, purposeless roads of our neighborhood.

“I think—“ I started, but decided to pause and refigure my sentence once again. Part of me wanted to do something to stop it. To jerk the wheel left and give us something bigger than this to focus on. Instead, I took a deep breath and started again, my eyes set on the pink horizon.

“I think I needed it… the silence.” The clouds were graying from the retreating light. “I guess I still had this… hope. You know I’m a hopeless romantic, and my imagination is a big part of me. I guess I thought, after building up this confidence and finally being ready, I would tell you this and… and you would be so relieved because you felt the same way but was also scared of it, of what it meant. I guess I knew deep down that we were past our expiration date, but if I never told you, the hope would never die. But now— now there is no storybook ending and I can see it clearly now. The reality of being too late.”

The sun was gone, fully submerged under the shield of the mountains. I missed it now, it’s beauty. I envied its escape. The clouds lay still and dark, and the silence returned to the world.

This is when I turned to her, to see if she was even still there or if she had been a fragment of my imagination all along. She looked at me, then at the absent sun, then at the floor. She opened her mouth to say something, and even after everything I couldn’t stop my heart from skipping a beat. But her mouth was closed again before anything came out.

I returned my gaze to the horizon. If anything, at least the sky hadn’t left me now, or ever. At least the clouds are stuck in the gray, dark times just as much as I am. At least I can convince myself I’m not fully alone.

I turned the radio up, enough that my unsteady breathing was masked by the running piano on tape. I brought my coffee to my lips, not to stop myself from speaking, but to suppress the sobs that were threatening to burst