Rehearsing Every Possible Ending

Now, you future simulate every possible outcome and call it planning. You run scenarios

like your brain is a film studio with an unlimited budget and a tragic obsession with endings.

Not just bad endings, possible endings. Every branch, every alternate timeline,

every tiny sentence that could tilt the whole story. If you say this, they'll feel that.

If they feel that, they'll pull away. If they pull away, you'll lose them. If you lose them,

you'll be alone. If you're alone, it confirms the thing you never say out loud,

that you're too much or too strange or too intense to be kept, and you tell yourself

this is responsible, this is foresight, this is maturity. You're just thinking ahead,