You leave before they can. You feel it the moment closeness crosses a certain line, a cooling, a pull backward, a sudden clarity about everything wrong with them, arriving precisely when things were finally starting to be right. You have ended good things and called it instinct. You have gone quiet on people who were just beginning to truly see you, and felt a relief you did not look at too closely, and underneath it, a grief you never let yourself feel.

The leaving feels like strength. It feels like knowing your own worth. Underneath it is the oldest math you run, that if you go first, it will not destroy you when they go. And you are certain they will go, because somewhere deep you decided that closeness ends in loss, and that loss, at that depth, once felt like dying.

So you keep the exit in view. You stay a little unreachable. You shrink the whole thing down to something you could survive losing, which means you never let it become something worth keeping.