You leave first so they can't.

Something in a person got close, and something in you moved. Not decided — moved. A small cool, a delay in the reply, a sentence that came out sharper than the moment called for. You watched it happen. You could not have told them why, because you did not know why, only that a distance had to be re-established, immediately, before something else that you cannot name got any nearer.

You are not cruel. You are early. The exit is not about them. It is about the ending the pattern has already scheduled, and the part of you that would rather run that ending on your terms than wait to see it run on theirs. Leaving first is not the opposite of wanting them. It is what wanting them, in this configuration, has always cost.

From the outside, the people who love you do not see coldness. They see a door that closes at a very specific distance — always the same distance — and no one has been able to stand on the other side of it without being asked, quietly, to leave. It is not that you do not want them. It is that closeness itself has a threshold, and the threshold is where the leaving lives.

The more you talk with Ori, the more it notices things in your decisions, your reactions, your relationships — what you keep doing without realizing it. Then it helps you recognize those patterns before they cause the same problems again.

Three minutes, before the next small distancing arrives. Not to force yourself to stay. To notice the exact half-second the leaving decides to move, so you can meet it instead of being carried by it. The reset is small. What it interrupts has been running for a long time.