To love is to have you by my side… Otherwise, to have lifelong therapy.
The Empty Chair Technique (Perls, 1969) is a form of Gestalt therapy in which a person converses with an empty chair — imagining their departed or lost loved ones seated there — to bring closure to unresolved internal conflicts and emotions. You would very well know it, as we belong to the same Introduction to Psychology class in which this was taught. And as for us, I knew for myself we’ll never have to go through such an excruciating method to get ourselves across, because you’re the one my heart opens to the most, and I, yours.
How we are began with an anecdote I would have been so unafraid to tell if it were asked: that we were seatmates back in first year, that I once cursed our being next to each other out of frustration with you — so much so that I looked forward to finally leaving the chair on your left — and that I get full just eating all the words I’ve just said early this year, as I now find myself anticipating the hours we sit next to each other every day.
So when classes started this year, the seat next to me was always left empty because I knew you’d eventually find your way there. It was an unspoken rule to the rest of the world that we were each other’s constants — an inseparable pair. Even in the presence of other people, I have your side profile fixed to the nearest desk, and your two-thirds view in my sketchbook.
Do you remember how school days would never end without your pleading invite, and my sighing of “fine” with the slightest up-curling of the lip, to have an afternoon meal by the eastern kiosks? Still, we both knew it was each other and the stomach-clenching laughter that left us full. How about how you sulked every time I left early for home, or how your crescent eyes found mine whenever a joke or amusing story had just been told?
And when the first hour of the day came, there was you at the end of the phone line, instead of sleep. We’d share our past, which only the two of us knew or were the first to know, send pictures and videos to update about our whatabouts, sometimes whereabouts; we’d do videocalls — starting with work or a coincidental timing of daily Wordle attempts, and ending with laughter that turns on the neighbor’s lights, or simply sweet nothings — and record voicemails of you playing the guitar to ballads that would eventually be lullabies when the dusts of dreamscape finally catch up. When I had to be woken up at an ungodly hour, you’d present to call in case my alarm didn’t work, and I, in turn, wouldn’t even attempt to turn my alarm on just to make sure it’s your voice I wake up to.
To me, who has always kept this kind of love last, who’s rejected all confessions hitherto, who sees romantic relationships no more than a distraction, you were an exception: you became a motivation to do and become better. To me, who has always stared at love from afar, I never knew it was possible to be this intimate: to be put first, to be given time, to let loose of half the butterflies in my stomach, so to give way for comfort and warmth — note: half, for as much as it’s embarrassing to admit, I still scrunch my nose and go slightly insane when I look back at your pictures and videos on my phone. To me, who relied on ideal scenarios to love someone I barely knew, this one felt so natural and real. After all, you’re my best friend… and someone to whom I’d say the quickest yes if you asked me to be yours.
A fairytale ending, a happily-ever-after that can never be taken away. But happily-ever-afters often come with the closing of the book, and so the missed thought of it makes me now laugh in awkward awe, for the moment I allowed myself to open became the moment the world chose to close itself before me. What’s funny about it is that I have gone through the tip of the same plot again and again for as long as I can remember being in love, and I’m starting to think I’m being given the chance to change how I respond to things.
But even now, as smart and aware as I am, I’m still bound by the martyrdom of keeping affections to myself once the wind has already carried the voice of another dear one, to the rest of the world. Who am I to become but the enemy of the army she built, and who is she but the lovely princess they swore to protect and favour? Bitter and aching as I am to recklessly enact the self-fulfilling confession methods in my head, — oh, you don’t know that I love you so dearly, and God, does it pain me that I can only whisper it in hopes that heaven take pity, if not favour, on me — I demote myself as the suffering subject and cut my tongue so the truth may never reach you as long as her feelings remain.
And then one day, to my half-happiness and half-dread, she confessed to you, and the rest was history. And as it has been with history, people win, people lose. Nothing too serious to my knowledge has happened thus far, but a series of attempts to fling, anyway. No, who am I even kidding? It was a kiss — well, a peck on the lips and a series of correspondences and walking her home — that made you actually consider falling back in love with her! And as though my suffering wasn’t enough, I happened to sit nearby every time telltales would bring their late-afternoon news about the two of you. The most sincere and unsolicited details make my stomach churn and pin my left chest to the deepest ring… it’s cold, so so cold.
Get duckie of the lake’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Just like that, the art of knowing things undeniably comes with severe repercussions. But it’s often the uncertainty entailed by prohibited knowledge that gives you so much to dread. Upon the series of inevitable revelations, I’ve swallowed my own fair share of dread that has made productive weekends immobile and starry midnights cloudy with bar-sung tunes: Perhaps it’s because I’ve gotten so used to how you always put me first and the hours we’ve spent with each other that I can’t help but notice each time you pull away — and miss you when you do so. I try to give it sense in my head, that there are really just days like that, and you’ve put up with my sulking and low energies too, but this time was different: The way you’ve been with me no longer bore speciality compared to how you would treat the rest, and how we once were in the past evaporated in one blink.
And in moments I have all of you to myself, I can’t help anymore but feel as though I’m but a recipient of your blessed charity, if not one of the ladies you confusely or consciously find obligated to return affections to. Perhaps I must thank your mother for raising an affectionate gentleman whose goodness transcends reckoning to a point that it bemuses hopelessly romantic hearts like mine to assume they mean something else to him.
But, if I were to ask you, do you think we would have been the same had this never happened?
Although, just like how it’s erratic to have placed the question there, what am I to do with what-ifs when it’s clear you didn’t choose me? When you’re out there actively pursuing her and adding to playlists about past lovers while sending me recorded serenades now buried in my favourites folder. Well, I also don’t blame you entirely, for you were probably also bound by your circumstances; nonetheless, while we were left wilting, it was quick for the rain to revitalize you. Maybe life really favours the brave, the one who risks it all and acts first. Or maybe, all that we had were just in my head all along. Maybe this was just an addition to my list of unrequited love stories, and I was really just alone in feeling that way.
Anyway, heretofore it’s just been me who’s been asking and explaining— speak now, would you! Please, speak, while we still have time. Let it come from you, away from the partial mouths of spectators and admirers. I’ve always told people that I get over quicker than I catch feelings, but come — better yet, stay — by me before I cross this bifurcated road of no return. And while I’d never go back, my heart should be at peace just knowing I once meant the same to you.
But until then, and after then, let me leave in this bittersweet past your pretty silhouette, the notes we take turns writing while unsuccessfully holding back laughter, and the instinct of thinking about you whenever I see videos of tomfoolery, bucketlisted movies, and romance.
Dear you, who bears the first letter of the name I call myself, know that I’ll always hold the same amount of love for you… but this time, I’ll choose myself.
If you wish to be next to another, let me not anymore be the one left behind to ache and spiral in this solitary war. I never want to feel as though each breath has to scrape the linings of my ribs in the name of love.
I accept how I’ll wake up to many suns, with the chairs next to us bound to be empty until it’s us who sit on them, as we’ve silently agreed on at the beginning. And I accept that avoidance can’t take space between us any time soon. But let me no longer bask weakly in nostalgia and simply rely on the strength I’ve shown in loving you as my dearest friend long before I saw in you a lover.
And while I did say my heart opens the widest to you, perhaps there are still many things I couldn’t say upfront, even now as it ends, and one of those is that you were the hopeful recipient of my words and songs. So let this be both my Empty Chair and my requiem, that someday, when somebody else takes your spot at the seat next to me, you might think of me fondly in loving memory of how we almost had it.
2025.09.13-10.04
