THE DROUGHT

Love doesn't starve you on purpose - but it starves you all the same.

He loved her, he swore it.

Just enough to keep the soil from cracking. Just enough so nothing would die outright.

He rationed tenderness the way farmers ration water before a dry season—calculating, cautious, convinced that giving too much too soon would leave him without. He knew what droughts could do.

So he gave his love in droplets. A touch here. A word there. A look that almost made it.

Almost.

And she, waited. Palms up. Face turned to the sky. Catching what she could. Pretending the trickle was enough.

She told herself he was careful, not cruel. That fear makes us stingy. That someday, surely, the rains would come.

But nothing thrives on fear.

The roots shrank. The blossoms withered. What might have bloomed between them curled into itself, waiting for a flood that never arrived.

They starved together—
not from absence,
but from almost.