Have you ever noticed how quickly you can convince yourself that something bad is actually a good thing?

Something happens, something you’ve been wanting doesn’t work out, and before the disappointment even has time to settle, you’re already looking for a reason why it might actually be for the better. You laugh, make a joke out of it, throw in a little "it’s okay, anyway..." and suddenly, what could have been a really sad conversation becomes something everyone can laugh about. You even surprise yourself with how well you take things — or at least, how well you make it look.

I didn't get into the university I wanted? Haha, it's fine! I have another university I like anyway. Maybe I'll like it there better. Maybe this is where I'm supposed to be. I might get laid off from work? Well, perhaps it's about time I found a new environment. Maybe I'll get a better offer somewhere else. Maybe this is actually a blessing in disguise. See? It's not so bad. There's always another opportunity, another possibility, another perfectly acceptable explanation for something I secretly wish had gone differently.

And the funny thing is, I'm actually quite good at it.

I can make a whole conversation out of something that, deep down, I don't even want to talk about. I can laugh with people about a rejection I haven't fully processed. I can give them a perfectly reasonable explanation for why things turned out the way they did, complete with all the possibilities that might come out of it. I can even make it sound like I wanted things to happen this way. It's almost impressive how quickly I can turn my own disappointment into a funny little anecdote. Sometimes, I wonder if I should be concerned about how convincing I am.

Until a few days later.

Because that’s when it hits me. Not during the conversation, not when people are asking if I’m okay, not even when I’m telling everyone that things will work out. It hits me when I’m alone, doing absolutely nothing, and my mind decides to bring up something I thought I had already gotten over. I’ll remember the university I wanted to get into. I’ll think about the job I might lose. I’ll revisit the possibilities I had already started imagining for myself, and suddenly, I don’t feel so positive anymore. There’s this little ache, this what if, this uncomfortable realization that maybe I really did want that after all.

It's such an odd feeling, having to privately grieve something you've publicly laughed about.

I think a part of me just doesn't like people knowing that something got to me. There's something uncomfortable about admitting that I wanted something badly and didn't get it. That I was looking forward to something, that I had plans, expectations, little scenarios in my head that I was genuinely excited about. Because once I admit that I'm disappointed, I also have to admit that I cared enough to be disappointed in the first place. And I'd rather be the girl who laughs about it than the girl who has to explain why she's hurting.

I don't want people to worry about me. I don't want to make a big deal out of things. I like being the person who can take a joke, laugh at her own misfortunes, and tell a funny story even when she's the punchline. I like being easy to be around, the one who always has something nice to say about an unfortunate situation. I suppose there's a certain comfort in being perceived as someone whose life is always relatively okay. Someone who can always find a reason to smile, even when things don't go her way.

But sometimes, I wonder if I'm just making things easier for everyone else, including myself, by pretending that nothing ever really hurts.

Why do I have to find a lesson in everything? Why can't I just be upset that something didn't work out? Why does every rejection have to be redirection? Why must every closed door come with a speech about how another one will eventually open? Maybe I don't want another door right now. Maybe I just wanted that one. Maybe I spent so much time wanting that particular thing that being told there's something better waiting for me doesn't make the disappointment disappear.

I think I’ve become so used to giving myself reasons to move on that I rarely give myself the chance to feel what I’m moving on from. I keep handing myself consolation prizes before I’ve even had the chance to grieve what I lost. I tell myself that it’s okay before I can even figure out whether it is. Perhaps that’s the part I need to work on, that not everything needs an immediate silver lining. Sometimes, something can just be unfortunate. Sometimes, I can admit that I wanted it, that I tried, that I’m disappointed, and that I don’t know what to do with that feeling yet.

I can be grateful for what I have and still be sad about what I don't. I can understand that there are other opportunities without pretending I didn't want the one I lost. I can believe that things will eventually work out and still wish they had worked out differently. Both can exist at the same time. I don't have to choose between being optimistic and being honest about how I feel.

I'll probably still find the bright side eventually. I know myself. I'll probably make a joke out of the next terrible thing that happens to me, too. I'll laugh, tell everyone I'm fine, and come up with another perfectly reasonable explanation for why things might actually be better this way. But I hope that somewhere between the laughter and the reassurance, I remember to check on the person who's actually going through it. The one who had expectations, who got excited, who wanted something to work out for once.

And if someone asks, maybe I’ll stop saying it’s fine so quickly. Maybe I’ll say that I’m a little disappointed. That I haven’t quite figured out how to feel about it. That I need a day or two to process everything.

I'll probably be fine. I usually am. I'll find something else to look forward to, another thing to get excited about, another reason to believe that life has something good waiting for me. I just don't want to keep treating my sadness like an inconvenience I have to get over before anyone notices.

Because just because I know how to make a joke out of it doesn't mean it didn't hurt. And just because I can see the bright side doesn't mean I wasn't staring at the dark for a while.

I think I've spent so much time making everything sound like nothing that I've forgotten I'm allowed to feel something.

Anyway, it could be worse.

But sometimes, I wish I could just let it be bad for a little while.

What if I call?

I have asked myself this question so many times that it no longer sounds like a question. It sounds like a dare I am too afraid to take. It comes to me when the house is quiet, when everyone else has gone to sleep, when the rain makes the windows look like they are crying for people who aren't here anymore. Sometimes I even open your name. I stare at the little circle where your picture used to be, at the number I never deleted, at the ridiculous proof that after everything, I could still reach you in eleven digits. My thumb hovers over the call button and for a few seconds, I let myself believe that maybe this is how we fix things. Maybe I call. Maybe you answer. Maybe you say hello like you have been waiting for me.

And then I remember that people don't usually pick up the phone just because you miss them.

I don't know when missing someone became such a physical thing. I used to think it was supposed to be this soft, romantic ache—the kind people write poems about, the kind that makes you stare out of windows and listen to sad songs. Nobody really tells you that sometimes it feels more like your body has remembered something your mind is trying desperately to forget. A certain street makes your chest tighten. A particular month makes you restless. Someone laughs in a crowded room and for half a second you turn your head because it sounds like them. You see a jacket hanging by a doorway and suddenly you remember how they used to walk inside from the cold, slamming the door behind them, complaining about the weather as if the weather had personally offended them.

And you hate yourself for remembering something so ordinary, because that is the cruelest thing about losing people, it is rarely the big things that stay, it is those stupid little things like the way they said your name when they were annoyed. The food they always ordered. The side of the bed they preferred. The little sound they made before laughing. The way they would text you something completely meaningless because they wanted you there, even if all they had to say was look at this. You don't remember the conversations word for word, you remember fragments. You remember the warmth of their hands, their voice coming through a speaker, or the shape of an afternoon you didn't know would become precious.

You remember everything you thought you would forget.

And I think that is why I am afraid to call. Because what if you answer?

People always talk about the fear of someone not picking up, but I think the greater horror is hearing the voice you've spent years trying to bury. Imagine spending all this time teaching yourself that the door is closed, only for someone to open it from the other side. Imagine hearing one familiar hello and realizing that all the distance between you was only enough to make you forget how quickly your heart could betray you.

What would I even say?

Would I ask how you've been, knowing I don't deserve the real answer anymore? Would I tell you about the things that happened while you were gone? Would I tell you I finally went to that place we talked about, even though I hated being there without you? Would I tell you that sometimes I still see things and instinctively reach for my phone before remembering that I don't have the right to send them to you anymore?

Would you tell me about your life? Would I hear another person's name? Would you laugh differently now? Would you sound happy?

I think that last one would ruin me.

Because there is a particular kind of heartbreak in finding out that someone you still mourn has learned how to live without you. Maybe you haven't thought about me in months. Maybe you deleted our pictures a long time ago. Maybe your life has filled itself with new places, new people, new routines, and I am nothing more than a name you occasionally recognize when someone else says it. Maybe you walk past the places we used to go without feeling anything at all.

And God, I hope you do. I hope you are happy.

I just wish happiness didn't have to look so much like forgetting me.

But there were some nights when I wondered if you were lonely too. It’s not that I want you to suffer. I don't think love should make you cruel enough to wish loneliness on someone. But there is something selfishly comforting about imagining that somewhere in your life, there is still a small room that belongs to me. Somewhere you keep the same memories. Somewhere you still wonder what would happen if I called.

Maybe you do. Maybe one night your phone lights up and my name appears, and you stop breathing for a second. Maybe you stare at it the way I have stared at yours. Maybe you let it ring. Maybe you answer. Maybe you don't.

The terrible thing is that I will never know unless I try.

And perhaps that is why I keep almost calling.

Because almost is safer.

Almost calling means I can still believe there is a version of the story where you would answer. Almost calling means I don't have to hear the coldness in your voice if you no longer know what to do with mine. Almost calling means I can keep you exactly where I left you—in that strange little place between memory and possibility, where you are still young, still familiar, still looking at me like I am someone you intend to keep.

Reality would ruin that. Reality would tell me how much time has passed. Reality would give you a different voice. Reality would make you a stranger.

And I don't think I can survive finding out that the person I have been missing all this time only exists in my head.

So I don't call. I let the screen go dark. I put my phone beside me and listen to the silence where your voice could have been. Outside, the night keeps moving without asking permission. Cars pass. Someone laughs somewhere downstairs. A dog barks at nothing. The world does what it has always done—continues, indifferent to the people who are still trying to catch up with it.

And I think, this is what growing older really is, learning that some doors remain unlocked even after you no longer have the courage to walk through them.

Maybe one day I will delete your number. Maybe one day I will stop remembering the exact sound of your voice. Maybe one day I will hear our song in a grocery store and feel absolutely nothing.

I hope that day comes. I also hope it doesn't.

Because there is a part of me that is still standing in that doorway, watching you leave, stupidly believing that every goodbye is temporary. There is still a part of me that thinks if I wait long enough, the weather will get better and you'll come back from wherever you went. There is still a part of me that hasn't learned that some people don't come back. They only become stories we tell ourselves when we are lonely enough to believe them.

And maybe that's what I have been doing all this time.

Calling you without ever pressing the button. Rehearsing conversations you will never hear. Missing a person who may not miss me anymore. Keeping your number because deleting it feels too much like admitting that I have finally run out of reasons to hope.

So what if I call?

Maybe you pick up. Maybe you say my name. Maybe for one brief, terrible second, the years disappear and I am there again, standing in the doorway, watching you come in from the cold.

And maybe that is all I really wanted, just one last moment where I could pretend I hadn't lost you yet.

Then the phone rings in my hand, and for once, I don't answer.

Because it isn't you. It's only my own number.

Somehow, I had been calling myself all along.

I hope you make it home.

I hope one day you wake up and the first thing you feel isn't dread. I hope there comes a morning when getting out of bed doesn't feel like negotiating with yourself. When you look at your calendar and find something there you are actually looking forward to. When you hear a song you used to love and, instead of remembering the person you were when you loved it, you find yourself humming along again.

I hope you find your way back to the things you stopped doing without even realizing you stopped doing them.

I hope you start writing again. I hope you take pictures of those stupid little things. I hope you stay up too late because you got carried away reading something you love. I hope you buy the pastry you used to think was too expensive. I hope you start dressing for no reason. I hope you become interested in something useless and wonderful. I hope you laugh so hard one day that it surprises you, because you had forgotten your laugh could sound like that.

I hope you become curious again. Curious about what the sky looks like at six in the morning. Curious about the little café you always pass but never enter. Curious about what kind of person you might become if you stopped trying so hard to be the person everyone needed you to be.

Because I think sometimes we lose ourselves in ways that doesn’t really look like losing ourselves at all.

We still go to work and still answer messages. We still show up to birthdays and deadlines and dinners. We still say we’re fine with enough conviction so that people will stop asking. We keep moving, and because we’re moving, nobody notices that some part of us has been standing still for a very long time.

Maybe you have spent too long surviving a life you were supposed to be living or maybe somewhere along the way, you became very good at being needed and very bad at asking yourself what you need.

So I hope you remember.

I hope you remember the version of you who wanted things without immediately calculating whether they were practical. The one who had ridiculous dreams and embarrassing interests and opinions about things that didn't matter. The one who could spend an entire afternoon doing absolutely nothing and still feel like the day belonged to them.

I hope you don’t look back at that person with embarrassment. I hope you look back with tenderness because they weren’t really naive, they were alive, and finding yourself again doesn’t mean becoming that exact person. You can’t go back and perhaps, that’s the cruelest part of growing up, that sometimes the door closes behind you and you spend years thinking the only way forward is to keep walking.

But I hope you discover that home was never a place you had to return to exactly as you left it. Home is learning what still feels like you. It is finding one small thing that makes you want to stay awake a little longer. It is realizing you still have the capacity to be excited. It is meeting someone who makes you feel safe enough to be ridiculous again or it is sitting alone somewhere and realizing you actually like your own company. It is finally wanting something again after months of wanting nothing.

And when it happens, I hope you don’t talk yourself out of it. I hope you don’t call it childish. I hope you don’t tell yourself that you are too old, too busy, too tired, or too far gone.

I hope you let yourself have it.

Whatever it is.

The new hobby. The strange little dream. The sudden urge to travel somewhere you've never been. The book you can't stop thinking about. The person you want to become. The life you were too afraid to admit you wanted.

I hope you follow it.

Even if you have to follow it slowly. Even if you don’t recognize the road. Even if everyone else seems to be going somewhere else.

I hope, eventually, your life stops feeling like a room you are only visiting. I hope you put things back where you like them. I hope you leave the windows open. I hope you make a mess. I hope you fill the walls with things that mean something to you. I hope you stop apologizing for taking up space.

I hope one day you catch yourself in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday and realize that you are happy to be here, because, somehow, somewhere between losing yourself and trying to find yourself again, you started feeling like you belonged to your own life.

I hope you make it home.

And when you do, I hope you recognize the person waiting for you.

I hope it's you.

a small prayer for the people who were too tired to save themselves

I don't know what happens after someone dies by suicide.

I don't know if there is a heaven. I don't know if there is a hell. I don't know what God does with a person who spent years trying to stay alive and eventually couldn't. I don't know what happens to the last thought, the last breath, the last terrible moment that made someone believe there was no other way out.

But sometimes I think about the way people talk about hell.

So easily, as if it is a simple equation.

You did this. You sinned. You knew better. You should have prayed more. You should have been stronger. You should have thought about your family. You should have waited. You should have asked for help. And then, somehow, heaven closes its doors.

I don't know.

I just find it difficult to believe that a God who knows everything about a person would look at the worst moment of their life and decide that the worst thing they ever did was not surviving it.

Maybe that’s too sentimental. Maybe it’s bad theology. Maybe someone will tell me I’m wrong, but I can’t stop thinking about them.

Those people who tried. The people who were still answering messages while falling apart. The people who went to work, went to school, ate dinner with their families, laughed at jokes, posted pictures, said I’m okay because sometimes saying anything else felt impossible.

The people who were alive in public and drowning in private.

I don’t want to imagine a God who punishes people for losing a war nobody else could see.

Because that's what makes me angry.

We are so quick to call it a choice as if every person standing at the edge of their own life has the same freedom of mind that we do when we talk about it from a safe distance. As if desperation is not capable of narrowing the world. As if pain doesn’t distort. As if there aren’t illnesses, circumstances, losses, abuses, loneliness, poverty, grief, shame, fear, and exhaustion that can slowly convince a person that tomorrow is not an extension of today but merely another room they have to survive.

I don’t think people who die by suicide necessarily wanted death. Sometimes I think they just wanted the suffering to stop.

And those are not the same thing. That distinction matters to me.

Because I have heard people say, “Why didn’t they just ask for help?”

And I understand the question but I also think about how difficult it is to ask for help when your brain has already convinced you that you are a burden.

How do you say please save me when you have spent months believing everyone would be better off without you? How do you knock on someone’s door and explain that you are afraid of yourself? How do you admit that the thoughts you’ve been hiding are getting louder? How do you tell someone you don’t trust your own mind anymore?

People imagine the moment before suicide as a person calmly deciding between life and death.

I don't.

I imagine someone exhausted and confused. Someone who has been carrying something for so long that their arms have forgotten what it feels like to be empty.

And I know that imagination is incomplete. I know I cannot know what was inside another person’s final moments. Maybe nobody can and that’s why I don’t want to judge them.

There is something deeply cruel about demanding a perfect decision from someone who is already suffering imperfectly. We ask people to be rational while they are hurting. We ask them to think about tomorrow while tomorrow is the thing they are terrified of. We ask them to remember that they are loved while their own mind is telling them that they aren’t. We ask them to fight and when they can’t, sometimes we call them selfish.

I hate that word.

Especially when it is spoken about someone who is no longer here to defend themselves.

Imagine being in so much pain that death begins to look like silence, and then being called selfish for wanting the noise to stop.

Maybe suicide leaves behind too many unanswered questions.

The family asks what they missed. The friend asks why they didn’t call. The mother remembers the last conversation. The sibling remembers the last joke. Someone keeps staring at an old message and wondering if there was a hidden warning inside it. Someone thinks, I should have known. Someone else thinks, I should have done more. Someone carries guilt that does not belong entirely to them because grief is very good at making people rewrite the past.

But sometimes there was nothing anyone could have done.

Sometimes people do everything they know how to do and someone still dies. Sometimes love is not enough and I think that is one of the hardest things for us to accept.

Because if love wasn't enough, then what was?

We want there to be a missed phone call. A conversation that could have changed everything. A door that someone should have opened. A sentence someone should have said. We want to believe there was a single moment where the story could have been corrected.

Maybe sometimes there was.

Maybe sometimes there wasn’t.

I don't know.

I just know that I don’t want the final chapter of someone’s life to erase everything that came before it.

A person is not their death. They were still someone’s favorite person. They still had childhoods. They still laughed until their stomach hurt. They still had songs they loved. Foods they craved. Places they wanted to see. People they wanted to impress. Things they were good at. Things they were terrible at. They were still the person who once got excited over something stupid. Still the person who stayed up too late. Still the person who made somebody laugh. Still somebody’s child. Still somebody’s friend. Still a whole human being. Even at the end.

And if there really is a God waiting on the other side of death, I hope He understands all of that. I hope He knows the difference between someone who wanted to stop existing and someone who desperately wanted to stop hurting. I hope He knows how much courage it took to make it as far as they did. I hope He knows about the mornings they survived that nobody knew were difficult. I hope He knows about all the times they almost gave up and didn’t. I hope He counts those, too.

And if people who die by suicide really do go to hell, then I have a strange little prayer. I hope there is a corner of it that is quiet. I hope there is a place where the fire burns gently, enough to keep them warm. I hope nobody asks them why they did it.

I hope nobody tells them they should have tried harder. I hope there are no sermons there, no accusations, no disappointed faces, no one making them explain the thing they couldn’t explain while they were alive.

I hope, for once, someone simply sits beside them.

I hope somebody says, You were tired. I know. You don’t have to explain anymore.

Maybe that’s an impossible prayer. Maybe hell doesn’t exist. Maybe heaven does. Maybe God would never send them there in the first place.

I don't know.

But I want to believe that if there is a God, He is gentler with the dead than we are.

Because we have a terrible habit of turning people’s worst moments into moral lessons. We say choose life as if everyone has been given the same amount of strength. We say life is a gift as if gifts cannot become unbearably heavy. We say God never gives you more than you can handle even though I have watched people receive more than any person should have had to carry.

And maybe that’s the part I can’t reconcile. If God is love, then surely He knows that some people are not refusing love. Some people simply cannot feel it anymore. Surely He knows that. Surely He can see the difference.

I don’t want to romanticize suicide. There is nothing romantic about the people left behind. There is nothing poetic about a mother waiting for her child to come home. Nothing beautiful about an empty chair. Nothing meaningful about someone having to identify the person they love. Nothing peaceful about a family learning how to say someone’s name in the past tense.

Death is still death. It still takes. It still leaves holes.

And I wish every person who is hurting could stay long enough to discover that the world can change shape. That the thing hurting today might not be the thing hurting forever. That sometimes the smallest interruption can keep someone here long enough for something else to happen.

I wish people didn’t have to be certain that life would get better because maybe sometimes they only need to be uncertain that it won’t.

Maybe I don’t know what tomorrow will be like can be enough. Maybe I can wait one more night can be enough. Maybe survival doesn’t always look like hope. Maybe sometimes it looks like postponing the ending.

And if you are reading this while standing somewhere close to that edge, I don’t have a beautiful sentence that can fix your life.

I won’t tell you that everything happens for a reason. I won’t tell you that you just need to think positively. I won’t tell you that other people have it worse. I won’t tell you that you owe the world happiness.

But please don’t make a permanent decision from the worst room you’ve ever been in. Tell somebody. Even badly. Even awkwardly. Send “I’m not safe alone right now.” Send a blank message. Call someone and stay silent. Go sit beside another human being. Go somewhere you won’t be alone.

If you are in the Philippines and you’re in immediate danger of hurting yourself, call 911 or go to the nearest emergency department. You can also contact the National Center for Mental Health Crisis Hotline at 1553.

You don’t have to explain your entire life before you deserve help. You don’t have to prove that your pain is serious enough. You don’t have to be dying to ask someone to stay.

And for everyone else, maybe we can stop asking why they didn’t save themselves. Maybe we can start asking why we built a world where so many people thought they had to.

I don't know where people go after death.

I don't know what waits for them.

But I hope, wherever they are, they are finally free from the voice that told them they were a burden.

And if there really is a hell, I hope it is the gentlest place in existence for the people who couldn’t save themselves.I hope the fire is warm. I hope someone holds their hand. I hope God sits beside them. And I hope, for the first time in a very long time, they are not afraid.

I used to think that the scariest thing about love was losing it. The leaving, the unanswered messages, the slow change in someone’s voice when they don’t feel the same anymore. I thought heartbreak was the dangerous part. You love someone, they become a part of your everyday life, and then one day they aren’t there anymore and suddenly you have to relearn all these small things like who to send the stupid thought to, who to call when something happens, whose name your fingers automatically type when you’re half-asleep. That kind of loss makes sense to me. There is something almost familiar about it. You can prepare for someone leaving. You can build little exits in your head. You can tell yourself not to get too attached. You can keep one foot outside the door. But nobody really prepares you for what happens when someone stays. When someone is patient with you. When they remember the small things you thought nobody noticed. When they don’t punish you for having a bad day. When they don’t make you guess whether they still want you there. When they love you in a way that doesn’t require you to perform for it. That, somehow, scares me more.

Because what are you supposed to do when someone loves you well?

You can't even be angry at them for hurting you.

There is villain, or terrible story you can tell your friends to make the ending easier to understand. Sometimes they are just good to you, and you are standing there wondering what the hell you’re supposed to do with all that goodness.

It is terrifying when someone gives you the love you spent years learning how to live without.

I think there is a particular kind of fear that comes with being loved by someone who actually sees you and not just the version of you that is funny and pretty and easy to love, not just the version you bring out on dates, not just the version that knows when to say the right thing, not just the version that has her life together. I mean the ugly versions. The irritated one. The insecure one. The one who gets quiet instead of explaining. The one who overthinks a three-word text. The one who sometimes needs reassurance and hates herself for needing it. The one who gets tired and becomes difficult. The one who doesn’t know what she wants. The one who has bad habits she keeps promising she’ll fix. The one who sometimes doesn’t even like herself very much. There is something deeply uncomfortable about realizing that someone has seen those parts and hasn’t started packing their things.

I've spent so much of my life thinking love had to be earned in little ways that I don't always know what to do with love that is simply there. Maybe this comes from growing up. Maybe it comes from watching relationships around me. Maybe it comes from the internet feeding us a thousand different theories about how love works until we're convinced that every delayed reply means something, every change in tone is evidence, every disagreement is a warning sign, every relationship has to be constantly analyzed for whether we're getting enough. I don't know. I just know that sometimes I catch myself looking for the catch.

There has to be one.

Maybe they will get tired of me. Maybe one day they’ll see me differently. Maybe they’ll realize I’m not as interesting as they thought. Maybe they’ll meet someone easier. Maybe I’ll become too much. Maybe I’ll need too much. Maybe they’ll wake up and decide this isn’t what they want anymore.

And because those possibilities exist, part of me wants to stay prepared. I want to know where the emergency exit is. I want to keep some part of myself untouched, just in case, which is such a strange thing to do to love. To enter it while already planning how you’ll survive its ending.

Sometimes self-protection looks a lot like refusing to be fully loved.

There is a certain safety in being loved badly. I don’t mean that I want it though. I mean that bad love gives you somewhere to put the blame. You can point to the lies, the inconsistency, the disappearing acts, the coldness, the person who only calls when they’re lonely. You can say, See? This is why I shouldn’t have trusted them. You can make a clean story out of it. They were wrong and such you were hurt so you leave, recover, and you become wiser.

But what happens when the person is kind? What happens when they listen? What happens when they apologize without having to be dragged there? What happens when they don’t make you compete for their attention? What happens when they tell you where they are because they know you’ll worry? What happens when they notice you’re quiet and ask what’s wrong, and they actually wait for the answer? What happens when they make room for you? What happens when they don’t make you feel stupid for caring? What happens when they choose you so consistently that eventually you have no excuse left for not believing them?

I think that's when love becomes frightening.

Because then the problem is no longer them.

It's you.

You have to decide whether you can believe something good without looking for the moment it becomes bad.

And that is harder than I expected.

I used to think being loved well would make me feel safe all the time. I guess that’s what people mean when they talk about healthy love. There are no games, no guessing, no wondering. And yes, there is safety in it, but there is also exposure. When someone treats you gently, you can’t hide behind the argument that you are difficult to love. You can’t keep saying, Of course I’m like this. Look at how people have treated me. At some point, someone can come along and treat you better, and now you have to confront the parts of yourself that still expect the worst.

You have to let yourself be happy without waiting for punishment.

That is hard.

I don't think we talk enough about how unfamiliar peace can feel when you've spent a long time expecting chaos.

Sometimes you mistake the absence of anxiety for the absence of chemistry. Sometimes you wonder why there are no butterflies, when maybe the butterflies were never romance in the first place. Maybe they were panic, or uncertainty, or maybe they were the nervous system trying to figure out whether it was safe.

And then someone comes along and nothing feels like a fight.

They text you. They show up. They mean what they say. You don’t have to decode them. You don’t have to become smaller. You don’t have to make yourself desirable every second. You don’t have to pretend you’re okay with things you’re not okay with just to keep them, and somehow, instead of immediately relaxing, you think:

Wait.

That’s it?

You actually like me?

You’re not going anywhere?

I don’t have to earn this?

It is almost embarrassing how difficult it can be to receive something you have always wanted.

Being loved well means eventually running out of reasons to believe you are unlovable.

And I think that’s terrifying because some of us have built entire personalities around being self-sufficient. We become the person who doesn’t need anything. We don’t ask. We don’t complain. We handle things ourselves. We say it’s okay before anyone gets the chance to disappoint us. We learn to leave first emotionally, even if we stay physically. We call it independence because that sounds better than fear.

Then someone comes along and says, You don’t have to do everything alone, and part of you wants to believe them but another part also whispers, Don’t, because if you let someone help you, they will become important. If they become important, they can hurt you. If you let yourself depend on someone, you are giving them something that can be taken away, so you keep a little distance. You tell yourself it’s healthy. You tell yourself you’re protecting your peace.

And yes, maybe sometimes you are, but sometimes you’re just standing in front of a door that someone has been gently holding open for you because you’re too afraid to walk through it.

I think love becomes especially frightening when it starts becoming ordinary.

When it’s no longer those sweet romantic gestures and dates and flowers and carefully chosen words. When it’s someone asking whether you ate. Someone remembering which food you don’t like. Someone buying the thing you mentioned three weeks ago and forgot about. Someone knowing when you want to talk and when you want silence. Someone hearing the same story for the fifth time because they know it still matters to you. Someone sitting beside you while you’re doing absolutely nothing. When love starts looking like errands. Like grocery lists. Like message me when you get home. Like I left some for you. Like did you sleep? Like knowing how the other person takes their coffee. Like having a person who knows the boring version of your life and still wants to be in it.

That scares me more than any romance ever could, because those extravagant romance can remain a fantasy but ordinary love asks you to stay.

The frightening thing about being loved well is that eventually, you have to believe that you deserve to stay.

And what if you do? What if someone really does love you? What if they have been telling the truth? What if you don’t have to become prettier, calmer, smarter, easier, more interesting, more successful, less emotional, less needy, less yourself to keep them? What if they already know? What if they’ve seen enough and stayed anyway?

I don’t know why that feels so much harder to accept than rejection. I guess, because rejection confirms something, but being loved challenges it. If someone leaves, you can go back to all your old beliefs. See? I knew it. People leave. I shouldn’t have trusted them. I shouldn’t have gotten attached. I should have known better. But when someone stays, especially when they stay through the parts of you that you thought would make them leave, you have to reconsider everything you thought you knew about yourself.

Maybe you are not too much. Maybe you were just asking the wrong person. Maybe you were never difficult to love. Maybe you were simply accustomed to having to convince people to do it.

And I don’t know which possibility is more painful, because if you have spent years believing that love has to be chased, then being loved freely can almost feel suspicious.

You keep waiting for the price. You keep wondering what they want. You keep asking yourself how long it will last. You keep preparing for the day they finally see what you see in yourself and maybe the cruelest part is that they might never. They might keep loving you. They might keep showing up. They might keep choosing you on all the boring Tuesdays and irritating Thursdays and ordinary afternoons that don’t look anything like the beginning of a love story, and you might have to live with the terrifying possibility that they mean it.

That this is real. That you are loved. That you don’t have to earn it today, or tomorrow, or next week.

Still, of course, they could leave someday. That’s the part nobody can promise away. No amount of healthy communication or reassurance or compatibility can make another person permanent. Love does not come with a guarantee. Someone can love you deeply and still change. You can love someone and still lose them. People die. People move. People grow in different directions. People become strangers. Sometimes there is no betrayal, there is no one to hate, sometimes two people just simply reached the end of the same road at different times.

I think that is what makes being loved well so frightening. You finally find something worth losing. You finally let someone matter enough that their absence would rearrange your life, and there is no way around that.

You can protect yourself. You can stay detached. You can keep one foot outside the door. You can tell yourself you would survive if it ended.

You probably would.

But you would still have loved them.

You would still know what it felt like to be chosen. You would still remember the ordinary little ways they loved you.

And I guess heartbreak is not the real risk, after all.

It’s atachment.

The terrible, beautiful stupidity of letting another person become part of your life when you know neither of you gets to stay forever.

So yes, I think being loved well is terrifying. It is terrifying to be seen. It is terrifying to be known. It is terrifying to need someone. It is terrifying to realize that you have started making room for another person in the future you once imagined alone. It is terrifying to stop looking for the exit because once you do, even for a moment, you realize just how much there is to lose.

And sometimes I still look for the catch. Sometimes I still get scared when things are too gentle. Sometimes I still wonder when the other shoe will drop.

I don't think that fear disappears just because someone loves you correctly.

Maybe you just learn to live beside it. You let yourself be happy while knowing happiness has never promised permanence. You let someone hold you while knowing their hands are human. You let yourself be known while knowing people can change. You let yourself love someone without demanding that love guarantee you a future, and that might be the most frightening part of all, to say: I know this could end. I know you could leave. I know one day something could happen that neither of us can control, and I am going to let you love me anyway.

Not because I am fearless, I am not, I’m just tired of treating every good thing like a disaster that hasn’t happened yet, and that is what being loved well asks of you.

Not certainty but the unbearable vulnerability of staying long enough to find out what happens when, for once, nobody is trying to hurt you.

There are nights when I look at you and I cannot tell if I am looking at home or at a beautiful place I am only passing through. I keep wondering if love always comes with an expiration date folded somewhere inside it and hidden so carefully that we only find it after we've already unpacked our hearts.

I don't know why I think about endings while you're still here. Maybe because I have learned that permanence is the cruelest promise people accidentally make. Nothing ever says that it is temporary, it simply stays long enough to convince you it isn't.

Sometimes I watch you laugh, and instead of feeling safe, I feel afraid. Afraid because this exact version of you is happening only once. This Tuesday evening. This conversation. This silence between us. Tomorrow, we'll already be different people pretending we are the same ones from yesterday.

Isn't that terrifying? That we never really love the same person twice? Every sunrise quietly change us until we become strangers wearing familiar faces.

I wonder if people who stay together for fifty years ever stop grieving the countless versions of each other they had to lose along the way. Perhaps forever isn't built by never changing. Perhaps forever is simply agreeing to fall in love with every stranger your favorite person becomes. But what if one day you become someone who no longer recognizes the shape of my name inside your mouth? What if I wake up beside you and realize that the distance between us isn't measured in inches anymore, but in all the things we forgot to say before they became too late?

I keep asking myself a question I am too embarrassed to say out loud because it sounds like betrayal while you're kissing my forehead: are we building a life together, or are we simply becoming each other's most beautiful memory? Maybe not every relationship is meant to survive. Maybe some people comes carrying nothing but a lesson disguised as affection. Maybe you are not the person I grow old with. Maybe you are the reason I will know how to love the person I eventually do. There is something unbearably lonely about that thought, that someone can completely rearrange your soul without ever belonging to your future.

People love saying, "If it's real, it'll last." I have never believed that though. Some of the realest things disappear first. Childhood ends. Grandparents leave. Summer vacations become stories. The favorite shirt eventually fades after too many washes. Reality has never been measured by duration. It has always been measured by how deeply something changes you before it goes.

So maybe love doesn't fail just because it ends. Maybe endings are simply another language love happens to speak.

Still, I am selfish enough to want both. I don't want to call you my greatest lesson. I don't want to thank you for teaching me how to heal after you've become the wound. I don't want to become one of those women who smiles softly whenever someone mentions your name because enough time has passed to make heartbreak sound poetic. I don't want to write beautifully about surviving you. I want to be too busy living beside you to write about losing you at all.

But there is this quiet ache that visits me when you're asleep next to me. What if this is all your life was supposed to borrow? What if the universe only introduced you to each other so one day you'll know exactly what you'll spend years trying to replace? It is unfair how the happiest moments are often haunted by the possibility that they are already becoming memories while we're still inside them.

Maybe that is what scares me most, that one day I'll realize the version of us I keep trying to return to no longer exists anywhere except inside my own head. That our forever was never measured by calendars, anniversaries, or silver hair, it was measured by a handful of ordinary evenings that quietly became the standard by which I would compare the rest of my life.

So tell me, before time decides for us—before life interrupts us, before we become another story people summarize with they were good while they lasted—tell me honestly.

Are we building something that death itself will struggle to erase? Or are we simply standing inside the most beautiful moment of our lives... mistaking it for a lifetime until it slips through our hands, leaving us to spend the rest of our years wondering if forever had been there all along, only wearing the disguise of something heartbreakingly brief?

When I was a child, I used to think people abandoned their dreams only because they weren't brave enough to chase it.

Then I grew up.

Turns out, courage has very little to do with an empty refrigerator.

There is something deeply unfair about asking someone to choose passion when survival is standing at the door asking for rent. We love telling people to follow their hearts as though hearts have never worried about tuition fees, overdue bills, sick parents, younger siblings waiting for school allowance, or cupboards that echo when you open them. We romanticize the starving artist until the starving part stops sounding poetic and starts sounding exactly like what it is.

Hunger.

People say, "Hindi ka mapapakain ng passion na 'yan," as if it is meant to be comforting. As if practicality is a life raft and passion is only extra weight you should throw overboard. Maybe they're right. Maybe passion doesn't pay electric bills. Maybe dreams don't come with health insurance. Maybe love for your craft cannot be exchanged for groceries at the cashier.

But knowing they're right has never made it hurt less.

I wonder how many people are walking around carrying versions of themselves that never got the chance to exist. The painter who became an accountant because someone had to. The musician who learned spreadsheets instead of scales. The writer who stopped writing anything except emails because words stopped paying enough to survive.

Sometimes I catch myself wondering what my mother was passionate about before practicality learned her name. Before she became the person who always chose what was necessary over what she loved. I wonder what my father dreamed of becoming before he started measuring every opportunity against rent, tuition, and tomorrow's meals. We spend so much of our lives thanking our parents for everything they gave us that we rarely stop to ask what they had to give up. Maybe before they became providers, they were simply people with dreams that sounded just as impossible as mine.

That's why this hurts more than I know how to explain. What hurts isn't choosing practicality. What hurts is realizing that the choice was never really yours.

Because what kind of choice is it when one path lets you eat and the other asks you to gamble with everyone depending on you? We call it following reality, but reality has always favored the people who could afford to lose and that's why dreaming feels different depending on where you're standing.

For some, dreams are destinations. For others, they are luxuries with price tags.

It's easy to tell someone to chase what sets their soul on fire when you've never had to wonder whether fire can keep the lights on.

I don't think people stop loving their passions. I think they learn to love other people more. They choose stability because someone has to. They choose certainty because uncertainty has already taken enough from them. They choose the paycheck over the poem, the office over the orchestra they love, the promotion over the painting, because the responsibilities around them became impossible to ignore.

And that's the quiet grief nobody talks about. Not everyone who let go wanted to. Some of them simply ran out of room to keep holding on.

We celebrate the people who made it, the ones who bet everything on a dream and won. We build documentaries around them. We call them proof that passion always finds a way but we rarely hear from the ones who were just as talented, just as relentless, just as deserving. The only difference was that they couldn't afford to fail.

Maybe that's why I can never judge the person who chose practicality. I don't know what was waiting for them at home. I don't know what bills were folded inside their wallet. I don't know whose future they had to carry before they could even think about building their own.

Dreams don't disappear because people stop believing in them, they disappear because survival asks for a sacrifice, and dreams are often the first thing laid on the altar.

People love saying that passion cannot feed you. Maybe they're right, but I think what they forget to mention is that neither can regret. The cruelest part has never been choosing practicality. It's waking up years later, wondering whether the life that kept you alive was also the life that slowly taught a part of you how to die.

And maybe that's why I wonder what my parents dreamed of becoming before they became somebody's parents. Maybe that's what my parents did. Maybe that's what millions of people do every single day. They don't stop dreaming. They simply hand those dreams to the people they love and hope they grow into the lives they never had the chance to live.

That's why some dreams die of hunger — not because they weren't worth chasing, but because someone else needed to eat first.

People always say, "If it's meant for you, God will give it to you." And so I've always wondered why do people still pray for change as if our words could rewrite what has already been written. If everything is already part of God's plan, then what exactly are we doing every time we close our eyes and ask for something different? Are we asking for the future to change, or are we simply trying to survive the version of it we haven't met yet?

Maybe that's why I've never fully believed that prayer is only about getting what we ask for, because if it were, then unanswered prayers would've driven all of us away a long time ago. Yet people still whisper wishes into the dark, they still fold their hands before surgeries, they still look up after funerals, and they still hope because sometimes saying what hurts out loud is already a way of carrying it.

I've noticed that people rarely pray when life is exactly the way they want it to be. Some only pray when they're standing in front of something too heavy to lift alone. Some pray only when words fail in conversations with other people, or because there are fears too embarrassing to admit, dreams too fragile to say confidently, and grief too enormous to explain. Maybe prayer is simply the language we use when there are no better words left.

And maybe that's why we ask for change even when we believe everything has already been planned by Him. Not because we expect the entire story to bend for us, but because we're hoping something inside us will. We don't always need different circumstances, sometimes we just need a different way of carrying them. We ask for doors to open, but sometimes what changes is our willingness to knock on another one. We ask for the storm to leave, but sometimes we simply become the kind of person who no longer mistakes rain for the end of the world.

I don't think people pray because they're trying to negotiate with destiny. I think people pray because hope needs somewhere to go. Because keeping it trapped inside yourself is exhausting. There are things we can't tell our friends without feeling dramatic. There are fears we don't even know how to name. There are nights when the only thing louder than the silence is the sound of our own thoughts. Maybe prayer is just where people leave the weight they can no longer carry, even if only for a little while.

And maybe that's the part we've misunderstood all along. We keep asking, "If everything is already God's plan, why do people still pray for change?" Maybe because after all, prayer was never really a proof that we doubt the plan, but a proof that we're human enough to hope anyway. We are creatures who dream of different endings even while believing there is already one waiting for us. We ask for change not because we think the story is unfinished, but because we are, and perhaps that's why people never stop praying. It is not because they're trying to change what has already been written, but more like because every prayer quietly says the same thing: if the ending is already yours to decide, then let me become someone who can meet it.

to write and heal, always

for requests, messages, commissions, and collaborations, feel free to reach out via:

email: fyoaeuriz@gmail.com

instagram: aeurisz

works are also available via:

instagram: pennedbyris

tiktok: pennedbyris

I used to think forgetting was another kind of loss. Another funeral no one really warns you about. First, you forget the sound of their voice, then the way they laughed, then the little things you once believed your body would remember forever like the exact shade of their favorite shirt, or the words they whispered before they left, or the reason your chest hurt every time a certain song came on. You panic the first time you realize you can't recall them and so you dig and dig through those old messages, photographs, journals, hoping memory is only playing hide-and-seek. Because if you can't remember them the way you used to, then what was all that loving for?

People love saying that time steals. It steals faces, voices, and birthdays. It steals the sound of someone's laugh or the exact shade of a childhood bedroom. We blame it every time we forget a name, a date, or the way somebody used to hold our hand. We talk about forgetting as though it is a failure of love and time as though memories are proof that we cared enough, and maybe that's why we press flowers between the pages of our favorite book, keep movie tickets in drawers, or refuse to delete conversations from people who haven't spoken to us in years. We collect evidence that something happened because we're terrified of the day our minds stop carrying it.

But memory has never worked that way.

Memory edits. It leaves things out. It blurs the faces that once lived inside us so vividly we thought we'd recognize them in every crowd. There are people who ruined you whose smiles have already begun dissolving at the edges. There are apologies you waited years to hear but can no longer repeat. There are nights you believed would divide your life into a before and an after, yet now all that's left is the knowledge that they happened. The pain remains a fact but it is no longer a place you live in.

And maybe that is the closest thing we have to a miracle.

Imagine remembering everything exactly as it happened. Every sentence arriving with the same force it did the first time. Every humiliation still burning against your skin. Every goodbye refusing to become yesterday. We romanticize perfect memory as though it would make us wiser, but I think it would only make us prisoners. There are people who spend years trying to leave a moment their own minds refuse to let go of.

It wasn't because what happened is not real or that it didn't matter, but because there comes a point where remembering every detail stops honoring the past and starts punishing the person who survived it. Perhaps our minds understand something our hearts don't —that a person cannot carry every version of every heartbreak and still have enough room to become someone new.

I don't remember the exact words that once convinced me I wasn't enough. I don't remember every reason I cried myself to sleep. I don't remember the face I begged the universe to let me keep. Once, that terrified me. Now I wonder if my mind loved me long before I learned how to love myself.

So maybe I've been unfair to time all these years.

I've accused it of stealing when perhaps it was protecting me. I've mourned the memories I lost without realizing some of them were making space for a life that no longer needed to revolve around pain. After all, maybe forgetting was never really the cruel part, maybe the cruel part would have been remembering everything.

People love to say that time heals. I don't think that's true. I think we heal because time keeps asking memory the same question until one day it no longer answers with pain.

And when the day comes that I can no longer remember the exact words that destroyed me, I hope I don't mourn them. I hope I thank them for leaving.

Because the kindest thing time ever did was not teaching me how to remember less, it was teaching me that some memories were never meant to be carried until the end of our lives. Some were only meant to stay long enough to change us, then leave before they became us.

to write and heal, always

for requests, messages, commissions, and collaborations, feel free to reach out via:

email: fyoaeuriz@gmail.com

instagram: aeurisz

works are also available via:

instagram: pennedbyris

tiktok: pennedbyris

Sometimes I wish I didn't care so much.

I wish unanswered messages could remain unanswered without me rereading them at midnight, searching for a hidden meaning between words that were never there. I wish goodbyes felt like closed doors instead of unfinished conversations. I wish I could watch people leave and simply nod, instead of standing in the doorway of my own mind long after they've gone, replaying everything I should have said differently.

Life looks easier for people who know how to detach. Those who can shrug and move on. The ones who don't carry entire conversations home with them. The ones who can disappoint and be disappointed without turning it into a personal philosophy.

I envy them sometimes and how lightly they seem to walk through the world.

Meanwhile, I care about everything.

I care about the friend who says they're fine a second too quickly. I care about strangers crying in public bathrooms. I care about old people eating alone in restaurants. I care about the plant on the sidewalk growing through a crack in the concrete as if determination itself had roots.

I care about people who no longer care about me.

And maybe that's the embarrassing part.

Not that I care, but that I continue to care long after it is practical.

Long after the relationship ends. Long after the apology is accepted. Long after everyone else has forgotten.

Sometimes I wish I could just cut that part out of myself. Remove it cleanly like a surgeon excising a harmless but inconvenient organ. Imagine how much lighter I would be. How much less disappointment I would carry. How many nights I would save myself from overthinking.

But every time I imagine becoming that person, I realize I don't actually want what comes with it.

Because the truth is that the same heart that breaks too easily is the heart that notices beauty where others walk past it.

The same softness that gets wounded is the softness that lets me love things completely.

The same part of me that mourns deeply is the same part that feels joy with unreasonable intensity.

I cannot amputate one without losing the other.

I cannot become numb only in the places that hurt.

It doesn't work that way.

You don't get to build walls that keep grief out while leaving wonder untouched. The walls don't know the difference. They block everything. The sorrow, the awe, the heartbreak, and the miracle.

And that is what I've been learning, that caring has never been a flaw, it has only ever been expensive.

The bill arrives in disappointment, in longing, in sleepless nights, in giving more than you receive, in remembering people who have forgotten you.

But it also arrives in sunsets that stop you mid-sentence. In friendships that feel like coming home. In finding pieces of yourself inside books written by strangers. In the unbearable privilege of loving something enough that its absence leaves a mark.

After all, maybe the point was never to stop caring, maybe it is learning how to survive the cost.

Because when I look back at every version of myself, the ones who loved too much, hoped too hard, stayed too long, believed when they shouldn't have—I don't feel embarrassed by them anymore.

I feel protective.

Those versions of me got hurt, yes. But they also kept choosing tenderness in a world that constantly rewarded indifference.

And I think that is something worth keeping.

So yes, sometimes I wish I didn't care.

Sometimes I wish my heart were quieter and easier to carry.

But then I think about the alternative.

A life where nothing touches me deeply enough to leave a bruise. A life where loss cannot find me because love never did. A life where I am untouched, unmoved, unbroken—and therefore unchanged.

And suddenly, that sounds far lonelier than any heartbreak I have ever survived.

If caring means I will occasionally crack beneath the weight of being human, then so be it.

At least when they look inside me, they will find evidence that I was here.

Not untouched. Not protected. Not preserved.

But lived in.

Like a book with folded corners. Like a shoreline shaped by years of waves. Like a heart that never learned how to look away.

And maybe that is who I have always been.

Not someone who cared too much.

Just someone brave enough to let the world matter.