But You Promised

At first, it made me laugh. I literally thought, who writes “But you promised” on the side of a building?

But then I sat with it for a second.

“But you promised.”

There’s something haunting about those words because they’re rarely about the promise itself. They’re about the trust that came with it. The decisions you made because you believed it. The parts of yourself you allowed to feel safe because someone gave you their word.

And then one day, you’re left standing in the distance between what someone said and what they actually did.

But maybe there’s another layer to it too. What happens when, after breaking a promise, someone decides the answer is to stop giving you words you can hold onto?

The person who broke the promise protects themselves from being held to future promises, while the person who was hurt loses the security of being given one at all.

And somehow, that feels backwards.

At some point, you start wondering whether breaking the promise taught them to be more careful about the promises they make, or simply more careful about giving you anything you can hold onto.

And maybe that’s the part that cuts deepest.

Not just, “But you promised.”

But quietly wondering, am I no longer worth a promise at all?

Maybe the harder question is what trust is supposed to look like after that. How do you rebuild trust with someone who wants you to believe what they say, but doesn’t want you to hold onto their words if things change? Because at some point, reassurance without anything firm behind it starts to feel less like security and more like something you’re expected to accept in the moment.

Maybe that’s why, after the initial laugh, these words stayed with me.

Because sometimes the hardest thing to reconcile isn’t that something changed.

It’s remembering that there was a time when you believed it wouldn’t.