the version of me I refuse to lose
I used to think love always ended with heartbreak — a sharp cut, a door slammed shut, two people turning into strangers overnight. But sometimes it ends differently. Sometimes it ends with a quiet realization: this isn’t the kind of love I want to keep carrying.
And here’s the thing — it’s not your fault. There’s no one at fault. You didn’t hurt me. You didn’t promise me anything you couldn’t give. If anything, you were kind. Patient. You still are. We still talk, laugh, share fragments of our days. There’s no dramatic goodbye waiting to happen.
But I started noticing the version of myself I became around you — the way my feelings slowly blurred into obsession, the way my curiosity about you turned restless when you couldn’t meet it with the same depth. At one point, I even imagined a love rivalry where there was none. You told me that person had nothing to do with you — it might have been true, it might have not. But your words should have been enough. They weren’t. My trust issues and insecurities swallowed them whole, twisting your silence into lies you never told. And that’s when I knew my feelings were no longer soft or simple — they were starting to turn me into someone I didn’t want to be.
Because through all this, I realized: maybe love isn’t always about the other person. Maybe it’s also a mirror — reflecting back the parts of ourselves we still need to tend to. The parts that cling too tightly. The parts that confuse desire with urgency. The parts that forget love is not meant to swallow us whole.
Liking you showed me the spaces inside me that still ache for reassurance, the parts that panic when met with uncertainty, the pieces of me that want love to arrive like a promise rather than a possibility.
And maybe that’s what this was for. Not to end in romance, but in understanding. Not to claim you, but to reclaim myself.
So I’m grateful. Truly. For you, for the feelings, for the clarity. Because now I know — before I give my heart away again, there is more of it I want to know first. More of it I want to grow into.
Maybe love will find me again when I’m ready to meet it without losing myself inside it.
