When Love And Hate Collide
When did a simple admiration become something I could no longer put into words? I told myself he was just a happy crush, a passing feeling that would eventually fade. Yet somewhere between our conversations and the things I came to admire about him, I found myself holding the same pen again, searching for words to describe a feeling I thought I had already buried.
And then, before I know it, I am writing again.
Love has a strange way of making possibilities feel like promises. He possessed so many of the qualities I had quietly prayed to find in a man, and for a moment, I wondered if maybe he was the person I had been waiting for. There was something about his mind that drew me in, something so lovely about the way he thought that made me want to know the person behind every conversation. I began to wonder what it would be like to know him beyond the little things he shared with me.
I saw everything I had ever wanted in him and, without even realizing it, I started imagining a story that was never meant to happen in real life.
Maybe that's the saddest thing about almost-love. Sometimes, you don't fall for what you have with someone, but for what you wish you could have with them.
And now, I find myself listening to When Love and Hate Collide, finding comfort in a song that seems to understand the feelings I cannot explain. Perhaps the hardest part of liking someone is knowing that your feelings can be real even when they lead nowhere. You can admire someone with all your heart and still accept that your story may never become what you hoped it would be.
And maybe that's what I am learning to do, to let myself feel everything without expecting anything in return.
Even so, accepting reality doesn't mean I never wish things had been different. I know that wishing cannot change someone's heart. I can understand that he likes someone else and still feel the little ache of knowing that.
Somewhere in the quiet corners of my heart, I had hoped it might have been me...
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I wonder if he will ever know that someone found his mind beautiful, that someone saw in him the qualities she had been praying to find in a man. Perhaps he never will. Perhaps these words will remain the only place where my feelings for him are allowed to exist.
Hate is a word I cannot use for someone I still admire. I don't hate him. How could I, when he never promised me anything? He never owed me the feelings I quietly hoped he might have. And yet, there is a part of me that wishes things could have unfolded differently.
A part of me that wonders what might have happened if the timing had been kinder, if the circumstances had been different, if the feelings I carried had found their way back to me...
Collide is where love and hate begin to meet, in the space between what the heart wishes for and what reality allows.
I can admire him and still accept that he may never see me the way I see him. I can wish for a different ending without believing that he owes me one. I can acknowledge that he became someone important to me without pretending that we were ever something we weren't.
Perhaps writing has become my way of saying goodbye to things I never got to hold in the first place.
I genuinely thought I had found someone who carried so many of the things I had been praying to find in a man. Someone whose qualities made me wonder if the kind of love I had always imagined was finally beginning to take shape.
Until then, I suppose I will keep writing. Not because I want him to change his mind, but because I am still learning how to let go of the things my heart once hoped for.
Maybe some people are not meant to become our love stories. Maybe they are simply the pages that teach us what we long for, what we must release, and what we should never have to beg to receive.
And perhaps, in another lifetime, I will finally understand why some people arrive only to become stories.
In the end, all I have left is another story to tell.
