The Love I Had to Take Back
Everything is where it should be.
I am where I should be. I am sitting at my desk, studying like I am supposed to, my earphones in, my playlist playing the same playlist I made months ago, back when his name still made something inside my chest move in a way I didn’t understand, something warm and stupid and alive, before his name became attached to this hollow feeling that sits somewhere inside me now and doesn’t seem to have a beginning or an ending.
The room looks exactly the same, my books are open, my notes are in front of me, my coffee is getting cold beside my hand, everything around me is completely normal, and yet I feel like something has been taken out of the middle of my life and nobody else can see the empty space it left behind.
I keep looking at my phone. I don’t even open it anymore. I just look at it, almost waiting for the screen to light up on its own, even though I already know it won’t.
One day. Twenty-four hours. And he hasn’t typed a single letter. Maybe to him that is nothing. Maybe he hasn’t even noticed. Maybe his day continued exactly as it always does while mine keeps stopping for a second every time I remember that he hasn’t said anything.
I told him I love him. I finally fucking told him. After months of carrying those words around like something too fragile to let out, after every conversation where I wanted to say it and swallowed it back, after every late night call, every laugh, every little moment where I let myself believe that maybe I meant something to him, I finally said it. Not only that I love him but everything I felt a full fledge confession after ending things.
I didn’t ask him to love me back. I didn’t ask him to choose me. I didn’t ask for a relationship, a future, promises, daily conversations, commitment, or anything that would have required him to become someone he never said he wanted to be.
I just told him the truth.
I love you. And he saw it. Those two blue ticks are still there, and sometimes I hate how something so small can hurt so much. He read the words that had taken me months to say and gave me nothing. No reaction. No acknowledgement. No “I know.” No “I’m sorry.” Nothing. Just silence.
And maybe I lied to myself when I said I expected nothing from him, because I didn’t expect him to love me, but I expected him to understand that I had just placed something real in front of him. I expected the person I loved to at least care that I had said it. I expected one human response. That’s all. And somehow even that was too much. The truth is, I knew what he was doing to me long before I admitted it to myself. I knew I was becoming something convenient to him. I knew he wanted certain things from me, and I knew that once he got what he wanted, he could become distant again, as if whatever had happened between us had an expiry date.
I knew I was being treated like something he could reach for when he wanted and put away when he didn’t.
I knew it, and still I stayed emotionally attached to him. I knew he could be cold. I knew he could be rude. I knew there were things he lied about. I knew he wasn’t ready to trust me, wasn’t ready to show me his life, wasn’t ready to give me anything that made me feel secure.
I knew all of it.
And still, every time he pulled away, my first thought wasn’t “how dare he do this to me?” It was “what happened to him?” Is he okay? Is something wrong? Is he going through something? Because I had met a different version of him once. I had seen him be kind. I had seen the softness in him, and I became so attached to the possibility that that person was still somewhere inside him that I started explaining everything he did to me instead of simply accepting it.
I turned his cruelty into pain. I turned his distance into fear. I turned his silence into confusion. I kept creating reasons for him because accepting that maybe he simply didn’t care enough was too painful.
I thought maybe if I was patient enough, if I understood him enough, if I loved him without demanding anything, he would eventually feel safe enough to let me in. I thought maybe I could show him that not every person who loves you wants something from you.
That someone can stay without controlling you. That someone can care without asking for anything in return. I wanted to show him how beautiful things could be. And the saddest part is that I wasn’t even asking him for very much.
I wasn’t asking him to promise me forever. I wasn’t asking him to call me every night. I wasn’t asking him to make me the centre of his life. I wasn’t asking him to give me a relationship he didn’t want.
I just wanted kindness. I wanted respect. I wanted him to remember that there was a human being on the other side of whatever he was doing.
Someone who had feelings. Someone who cared about him. Someone who could be hurt. That was my bare minimum.
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And he couldn’t even give me that consistently. He could be so careless with me, so disrespectful, so detached, and I would still find myself worrying about whether he was okay. Do you understand how humiliatingly deep that love had gotten? He could be the reason I was crying and I would still be lying awake wondering whether he had a good day.
He could make me feel completely unwanted and I would still wonder if he was happy. He could leave me on seen after I finally told him I loved him and some pathetic, stubborn part of me would still hope he was okay. I hate that part of me sometimes. I hate how much I still want him. Because knowing the truth hasn’t made the feeling disappear.
I still miss him. I still think about him. I still see him in everything. A song starts and suddenly I’m back in some conversation with him.
A place reminds me of something he said. A certain time at night makes me remember his calls. Sometimes I catch myself wanting to tell him something that happened during my day, and then I remember that I don’t have that person anymore or maybe I never really had him in the way I thought I did.
And that thought hurts more than I know how to explain. Because maybe I wasn’t mourning a relationship. Maybe I was mourning the version of him I believed in. The version of us that existed mostly inside my hope. I kept thinking there was something underneath all of this that I could reach if I just loved him correctly.
I kept thinking there was a reason he became this way. But there was no mystery. There was no hidden answer waiting for me. He showed me who he was through his actions, and I kept asking his actions to mean something else because I loved him.
I was so busy trying to understand why he was hurting me that I forgot to ask why I was allowing myself to be hurt. I forgot that loving someone doesn’t require me to keep proving how much pain I can tolerate.
I forgot that understanding someone’s wounds doesn’t mean I have to become the place where they leave theirs. And still, even after realizing all of this, I cannot suddenly hate him.
I wish I could.
Sometimes I think it would be easier if I hated him. If I could look at him and feel nothing but anger, maybe I could finally walk away without looking back.
But I don’t.
I still care. I still want him. I still have that instinct to protect him from things he doesn’t even ask me to protect him from. I still wonder what he is doing right now. I still wonder if he thinks about me. I still wonder if he ever looks at our conversation and remembers that I told him I loved him. I wonder if those words meant anything to him at all. And then I hate myself for wondering, because why should I have to wonder whether I mattered to someone I gave so much of myself to?
Why should I have to look for evidence that I was important?
Why couldn’t he simply make me feel like I was? Maybe that is what hurts the most not that he didn’t give me the love I wanted, but that he made me question whether I was ever worth giving it to in the first place.
And somewhere along the way, the calmness I used to feel when I thought of him disappeared too.
I used to think of him and feel safe for a moment. Now I think of him and feel this strange emptiness, like my mind keeps reaching for something that isn’t there anymore. But maybe I have to accept that I cannot keep giving him ownership over my peace.
I can love him and still admit that what he did hurt me. I can miss him and still refuse to chase him. I I can remember the good parts without using them to excuse the parts that broke me. I can accept that I loved him genuinely even if he didn’t know how to hold that love. And maybe that is what I need to learn now that the fact that I loved him this deeply is not something I should be ashamed of. I wasn’t stupid for caring. I wasn’t weak for staying soft. I wasn’t foolish for hoping. I was simply in love.
Really, painfully, completely in love. And maybe I loved him more than he was capable of loving me, but that doesn’t make what I felt less real. It only means that now I have to take all that love I kept trying to pour into him and slowly learn how to bring some of it back to myself. Tonight, I still check my phone. I still wish his name appears. I still lie in bed and wonder whether he misses me at all. I still have moments where I want to call him, where I want to hear his voice, where I want to believe that one day he will suddenly understand what he did to someone who only wanted to be kind to him.
I wish those feelings could disappear tomorrow but they won’t disappear for a while. But I don’t want to spend the rest of my life waiting for someone to realize that I mattered.
I want to reach a point where I know it even if he never does. Because I did matter. My love mattered. My feelings mattered. And even if he couldn’t hold them carefully, they were never trash.
They were never worthless. They were mine.
