Alexa Daskalakis

The Rivalry That Never Happened

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She mistook stillness for strategy.
Kindness for calculation.
Every neutral sentence became a secret message sent her way.

I spoke into the air,
and she swore the wind was whispering her name.

It wasn’t cruelty.
Just a mirror turned inward—
a life built on reflections of threats that were never there.

I learned something then:
some people need an enemy to stay upright.
They balance on the friction.
They breathe best in comparison.

And when you refuse to compete,
you take their oxygen without meaning to.

I never even disliked her.
In fact, I liked her.
I just stopped appearing in her story.
And from the distance, I watched it collapse—
a feud kept alive
by only one participant.