The fish on the dry riverbed

The why you keep asking might have a colder answer than the one you're looking for.

You went back through the messages. You found the day the tone changed. You have a theory and the theory needs a verdict.

Zhuangzi wrote eight characters about fish. When the spring dries up, the fish end up together on the land, and they wet each other with their breath, and keep each other alive with spit.

Xiang ru yi mo. Wetting each other with spit.

Then the next line, the famous one. Better to forget each other in the rivers and lakes.

People quote the second half at weddings and breakups and it sounds like a slogan about being free. Look at the first half again. Those fish are on dry land. They are dying, together, and the spit is what they have while it lasts.

That's what intense closeness becomes when the circumstances have gone. Two people doing the maximum amount of care in a place that can't support either of them. It looks like love from the outside and feels like drowning from the inside.

You don't need the sentence where you went wrong. Some relationships have no sentence. The water left.

If you're still on the dry bed, admit it. Then look for the river, or wait for rain, but stop calling the spit a river.

MOJOWAY is for the honest part after the affection. Growth, here, is refusing to relabel a drought as a love story, however warm it was.