Monthly Archives: September 2026

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A few months couldn’t possibly be a long time, but then why does it feel that way? How can a few months somehow feel like a lifetime?

And I don’t want to romanticise it by saying that a single day can feel like a lifetime in all the right ways with the right person, while years can shrink into what feels like a day when you look back at all the time you spent with the wrong one. But maybe there is some truth to that.

I think it’s the moments that make something feel as long as it does. All the many, many fun things we’ve done, all the places we’ve been, all the memories somehow squeezed into such a short amount of time. At least for me, especially considering how dull my life had become over the past few years. And I had carefully curated it to be that way. Boring was safe. Because every time I wanted to have a little fun, I somehow invited trouble, and trouble had been scorching to my mental health.

But I never stopped wondering about the kind of fun life could be. I lived in the nostalgia of it, missing a version of myself and a life I wasn’t even sure I knew how to return to.

And then I met him.

And it was like meeting everything I’d ever wished for in a person. He brought with him so much of what I had missed, but mostly, he brought back the laughter. Maybe that’s why these few months feel like a lifetime. There have been so many moments where I’ve felt nothing but happy. Days when I was sad and seeing him somehow made most of it disappear. Not always, of course, because let’s be real, none of this is magical. It’s real and human, and it comes with its own set of flaws.

But I swear, meeting him lit a spark in me. One I thought I’d lost somewhere along the way, perhaps with no hope of it ever returning.

I could go on and on about it, but eventually it would start sounding mushy and corny and probably a little cringe because, ew, how is a man making me feel all these wonderful things?

But he is.

And some of the things I feel with him are things I have never experienced in my entire life. Things I genuinely didn’t think existed outside of fiction. The kind of wonderful novels are written about.

So maybe a few months isn’t a lifetime. Maybe it just feels like one when you’ve somehow managed to fit so much living into it.

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Personal

I have never understood how people can leave you when you’re in tears. When your eyes are wet and tears are streaming down your face, how does someone simply walk away? Especially when they are the only person there to witness it. How do you look at someone you care about falling apart in front of you and decide that you can leave them alone in it?

Unfortunately, this is a place I’ve found myself in more than once. Yes, I’m sensitive. Yes, I get sad over things quickly, and sometimes that sadness overwhelms me more than it probably should. But maybe that is also why I find it so difficult to understand. I know what it feels like to be left alone in tears, and because I know that feeling so intimately, I could never knowingly give it to someone else. I couldn’t walk away from someone who was crying because of something I had done. I couldn’t hear someone I love breaking down and decide that their pain could wait until I was ready to deal with it.

I’ve been hung up on while crying on the phone, begging someone to please just be nice to me. I’ve gone to bed crying while the person beside me pretended not to hear. I’ve had people walk away from me in the middle of active breakdowns. I’ve listened to someone fall asleep peacefully while I lay beside them crying. And these weren’t all the same person. That might be the saddest part. I have experienced different versions of the same abandonment from different people, enough times to know exactly what comes after. The neglect. The heartbreak. The strange chills that run through you when you realise you are completely alone in a room with someone else. And then the spiral that pulls you further and further down into the darkest parts of yourself, where suddenly you feel ridiculously, unbearably unlovable. Because you have just been seen at your weakest by the one person you thought your pain would matter to, and they chose to leave you there anyway.

There is something particularly cruel about being ignored while you are visibly hurting. It isn’t only the sadness you were already feeling anymore. Now there is another wound layered on top of it. The realisation that your tears weren’t enough to make them stay. That your trembling voice wasn’t enough to soften them. That even when your pain was right there in front of them, impossible to misunderstand, they were still capable of turning away. And in moments like that, you don’t just question what happened. You begin questioning what you mean to them at all.

Being a broken person sometimes means needing twice, maybe three times, the reassurance another person might need. It means there are wounds you didn’t create but may sometimes have to help carry. And I understand that can be a lot. For someone detached, emotionally unavailable, or simply unable to love in that way, those can be impossibly big shoes to fill. But when you choose to love someone, surely part of that choice is learning the person you are loving. Understanding that what feels insignificant to you might be enormous to them. That something you could brush off in an hour might keep them awake all night.

And then, just as I finished writing all of this, I remembered something that makes me feel like a bit of a hypocrite.

Because once, I was the person who watched someone cry and couldn’t find it in myself to comfort them.

I had caught him texting other people during one of the busiest weeks I’d had at work. I told him I would see him once the week was over because I simply did not have the time or emotional capacity to deal with everything while trying to get through work. I wasn’t refusing to deal with it. I was asking for time. I had made that boundary clear.

Then came one of the longest and biggest days of that week, ending with an evening event. I finally came home late and exhausted, knowing I had to be awake again by six in the morning. I already struggled to fall asleep that night, and when I eventually did, sometime around three in the morning, I suddenly sensed that someone else was in my room.

He had a key to my place.

When I opened my eyes, he was sitting on the floor of my bedroom going through my phone.

Seeing him there threw me into a fit of rage. The shock alone sent my entire nervous system into overdrive, and all I could do was yell and tell him to get the fuck out. How someone could be so inconsiderate was beyond my understanding. First you break my heart. You betray my trust for months. You lie to me over and over again, and then finally get caught because you were sleazy enough to leave evidence behind. And after all of that, I ask for one thing. Give me a week. Give me the space to survive one of the busiest weeks of my life before I have to deal with the mess you created. Instead, you let yourself into my home at three in the morning, while I am asleep, and sit on my bedroom floor going through my phone when I have to be awake three hours later.

And then he started crying.

I admit, I couldn’t find a way to empathise with him. Not then. This was after months and months of cruelty I had endured at the hands of this man, and suddenly I was expected to have tenderness left for his pain too. His tears couldn’t reach me through everything else I was feeling. I was too exhausted, too angry, too startled and too consumed by the sheer violation of what had just happened. I wanted him out of my house.

Remembering that immediately after writing about how incomprehensible I find it to leave someone crying made me stop. Because apparently, under the right circumstances, I could do it too.

And maybe that makes what I wrote earlier a little too absolute.

Tears alone do not automatically entitle someone to your comfort. Someone can be genuinely hurting and still have hurt you terribly. Their pain does not erase yours, and protecting yourself does not suddenly become cruelty simply because the person who hurt you is now crying. Sometimes walking away is not abandonment. Sometimes it is a boundary. Sometimes you have already given someone so much of yourself that there is simply nothing left in you to give them in that moment.

So let me change what I said.

If someone you love has done nothing to hurt you, if they are suffering in front of you and reaching for you, especially if you have played some part in why they are hurting, I cannot understand choosing to leave them there. I cannot understand hearing someone you love cry and deciding that you can simply go about your night while they fall apart alone.

And I think that is part of loving someone too. You inherit an understanding of wounds you had no hand in creating. You learn that certain things hurt them more deeply because of what came before you, and while those wounds are not yours to heal, sometimes loving them means holding them through the pain anyway. It means being careful with the places you know are already tender. You may not have given them their fear of abandonment, but once you know it exists, surely it matters what you choose to do with that knowledge. You can be the person who makes that wound feel a little safer, or the person who confirms every reason it was there in the first place.

Maybe loving someone isn’t just about feeling love for them. Maybe love is also what you choose to do when that person is hurting in front of you. And when you are the reason they hurt, perhaps love asks you to stay long enough to help carry what you have made heavier. Because there are only so many times you can leave someone drowning in their own tears and still call what you are giving them love.

And I’ll end this with the annoyingly simple wisdom of a friend who listened to me wrestle with all of this and reduced my many paragraphs to a single sentence:

“If he wanted to, he would.”

Stay, I mean.

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Personal

I can’t help but wonder how it will end. Because end it surely will. I would be a fool to hope otherwise.

I don’t believe in love anymore. That, I’m certain of. I don’t think people love the way they used to, with that incomprehensible, soul-consuming kind of devotion that seems to belong to another time. Maybe that kind of love was always more romantic fiction than reality, but somehow my heart never got the memo. When I care, I know no end to devotion. I think of their every whim. I remember the smallest things. Their worries become my worries, their happiness becomes something I want to protect, and somewhere along the way, I begin belonging to them more than I belong to myself.

And I’ve realised that this is how I want to be loved too. The way I love. In that ridiculous, inconvenient, all-consuming way where someone matters so much that you instinctively think of them before yourself. The annoying way I care so deeply that I often become an afterthought in my own life.

It feels almost like a cruel joke to have met him, and yet meeting him has been the most wonderful thing to happen to me in a very long time. And when I say a very long time, I mean over a decade. I prayed for something like this. For someone like this. I just never imagined my prayers would be answered on these terms.

There is shame in it. Guilt too. And beneath all of that, this quiet sadness over the doom that seems to wait for us somewhere ahead. It wouldn’t be fair for this to last, even though there is nothing in this world I would want more.

I knew I was falling for him long before I was willing to admit it. I think I knew from the first time I caught him looking at me that way, when something in his eyes tugged gently at something in my heart. But falling for him wasn’t sudden. It has been slow and real and wonderful. Evidence-based, if I may say. I didn’t fall for an idea of him. My feelings grew because of the way he treated me, because he kept showing up, because of all the little things that slowly became big things in my heart.

There was even a time when I probably should have lost every feeling I had for him. Instead, somehow, I forgave him. Maybe because somewhere along the way I stopped needing him to be perfect. I know we are flawed. I know no one is perfect. Not even him, despite how convinced I once was that perhaps he might be, until he very unceremoniously popped that bubble and reminded me that he was painfully human too.

And still, my heart aches.

It aches because somewhere deep in my soul, I think I understand the inevitable. I can almost see the version of my life where he is no longer in it, and perhaps what hurts most is knowing that one day I may actually have to live it.

Why did I have to meet someone so wonderful after all this time? Someone so strangely close to everything I had once prayed for, so perfectly imperfect in all the ways a person can be. How could something that feels so much like an answered prayer arrive with an expiry date?

Every moment with him feels no less than heaven to my heart and soul, while every moment apart carries this endless longing to see him again. He has consumed me in ways I never expected. I have quietly belonged to him for so long now that sometimes I wonder if I’ll remember how to return completely to myself.

And despite all the ways he shows me that he feels something just as deep, I still wonder if he really does. There is always room to doubt a man’s feelings and intentions. After all, he too is a man. A wonderful, beautiful man, but a man nonetheless. There will always be an ocean of women, fun, temptation and lust. So why would I be special? And even if I am special now, how long does special last?

A man’s wandering eyes found me once. Perhaps one day they will wander again and find another, and then another, and then another.

And as pathetic as it may sound, I’m still glad they found me.

Because I will say this again and again, simply because it is true. He is the most wonderful man I have met in my entire life. That is thirty-three years of disappointment, heartbreak, and learning all the ways people can make you feel insignificant, and somehow this man came along and made me feel more loved than I ever thought I could be.

I don’t say that because he has explicitly told me he loves me. He hasn’t, not quite. He has said it in vague ways, in words that dance around the thing without ever really naming it. But love has never meant much to me as a collection of words anyway. People can say anything. What matters is how someone makes you feel, and about that, I am certain.

I know what I have felt before. I know what loneliness feels like, even beside someone. I know what it feels like to question whether you matter. I know what it feels like to give far more than you receive. And I know that this, whatever we choose to call it, is the most loved I have ever felt in my life.

And somehow, that is the most heartbreaking part of all.

Because I finally found the feeling I had spent years wondering whether I had imagined. I finally know that it exists. I know what it feels like to be cared for in the ways I had always wanted, to be thought of, remembered, wanted, missed. And now I also know that having something beautiful does not necessarily mean you get to keep it.

So I’ll try to be wise enough to enjoy what is instead of mourning what hasn’t even ended yet. Only God knows whether something this wonderful will ever be written for me again. I got impossibly lucky and terribly unlucky with this one. Lucky because I got to feel something I had almost convinced myself I would never experience, and unlucky because somewhere in my heart, I know it is temporary.

Maybe I don’t have to be this sad about it yet. He has given me no reason to be. Maybe I am borrowing grief from a future that hasn’t arrived, mourning the ending while I am still standing in the middle of something beautiful.

But I’m a writer.

If I don’t grip onto the rawest feelings of my heart while they are still bleeding, how will I ever write?

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Personal

We stole kisses between the waves and held each other close for warmth. It was too dark to really see you, even when you were only inches away from me. I could barely make out the silhouette of your face against the night, and somehow, not being able to see you made me feel you even more. Your hand finding mine beneath the water, your body pressed against mine for warmth, your lips finding me in the dark. The sea carrying us while an entire universe stretched endlessly above our heads.

There was something almost unreal about it. Just the two of us floating beneath a sky overflowing with stars, holding on to each other in the middle of something so vast. The ocean beneath us, the universe above us, and somehow, in all that endlessness, nothing felt more significant than the person whose hand I was holding.

I don’t think I have ever felt closer to another human being than I did in that moment. There was something so beautiful, exhilarating and impossibly intimate about floating beneath an endless sky with your hand in mine. The kind of moment you wish you could preserve exactly as it was, untouched by time, so you could return to it whenever the world became a little less beautiful.

And somewhere between the stars above us, the sea beneath us, and your arms around me, I thought about how strange it is that a person can begin to feel like a place.

You really are my haven.

And I’m so glad you led me here.

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Personal

Because I believe so deeply that what’s meant to be will always find its way to you, maybe I’ve never really fought hard enough for anyone or anything.

Because why must you fight for something that’s meant for you?

Or maybe the few times I did fight for someone or something, only for it not to work out, the heartbreak was so unbearable that somewhere along the way, I decided I could never put myself through that again. Maybe it became easier to believe that the things meant for me would stay, and the things that left simply weren’t mine to keep.

And that’s exactly how I see this. I don’t know where it’s going, or what it will eventually become, but somehow, you make even the uncertainty of it beautiful. With every touch, every look, every little gesture, you make me feel how deeply you feel for me. There are things you never have to say because I see them in your eyes and feel them in the way you hold me. And so, even though there is something heartbreakingly uncertain about us, being loved by you makes all of it feel strangely whole. It makes whatever this is, however long I get to have it, feel entirely worthwhile.

I’ve had relationships with far more certainty and commitment, and yet no one has ever come close to loving me the way you do. It’s the kind of love I spent so much of my life dreaming about but never quite believed existed until I found it in you. You’ve somehow made my solitude dull, when being alone was something I once genuinely enjoyed. You’ve made your absence feel lonely, when I used to think my own company was more than enough. Now, every moment spent away from you feels like it’s missing something. Like there is a version of life before you, and then there is this one, where everything feels a little fuller simply because you exist in it. I’ve found love in you. I’ve found hope in you. And somewhere along the way, I think I found my whole world in your arms.

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Personal

This is one of those times life has surprised me so pleasantly that I’m in absolute awe of it. You meet one shitty guy after another, the ones who say all the right things but somehow manage to do all the wrong things, and eventually, it’s bound to take a toll on you. You begin to wonder if perhaps the things you dream about simply don’t exist. Maybe those connections you’ve spent your whole life believing in were inspired by too many books, too many stories, too much of a hopeless romantic heart. Maybe they belong in fiction and not in real life. And so, eventually, you stop looking for them. Maybe it’s time to get real. You stop letting your hopeless romantic heart drive the car and, for once, you put logic first.

And that’s when I met him. When I wasn’t really looking for any of it. Meeting him was one thing, feeling that connection with him was another, but I still wasn’t convinced. It was just another good time, one that surely wasn’t going to outlive the next sunny day.

Except it did. Shockingly.

And every day after that, he kept showing up. Without missing a single day since we met, he kept showing up until somewhere along the way, it became a habit. Months passed and nothing changed, except that we grew closer. I knew how foolish it would be to expect anything, so I didn’t. I was simply enjoying this temporary happiness that I was certain would eventually flee. But then came one gesture after another, each somehow surpassing the last, some beyond even my wildest dreams. And here was a man choosing me so completely in every moment he could, making me feel seen, heard and loved without ever having to say too much, simply by doing all the right things. It felt a little like culture shock because, for perhaps the first time in my life, I was experiencing the kind of love I had always dreamt of. The kind I had eventually convinced myself didn’t exist. And now, much to my surprise, I have to acknowledge that it does.

Whatever happens tomorrow, I know that right now, this is the most seen and cared for I have ever felt. There is something incredibly beautiful about genuinely feeling adored by someone. Not having to search for it between the lines or convince yourself that it’s there, but simply knowing because of the way they treat you. And I didn’t think that was possible for me. I didn’t think I was the kind of girl someone would cross oceans for, the kind someone would go out of their way for just to see her smile, the kind someone could make feel so undeniably special.

And maybe that’s the most surprising part of all of this. For once, I’m not wondering what he sees in me. I’m not questioning why me, or waiting for him to realise that perhaps I’m not as special as he thinks I am. Because somehow, through the way he loves me, I finally feel like THAT girl. And he makes me feel THAT way.

Maybe the world is healing.

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Personal

He’s loved me more than anyone has ever loved me in my whole life, and maybe that’s precisely why it makes me so sad.

Part of it is that somewhere inside me, I still don’t feel like I deserve it. I often fail to understand why he would feel this way about me, why he would choose to be this patient with me, this gentle, this caring. And sometimes, when I can’t make sense of it, I find myself wondering if perhaps this is simply who he is. Maybe he loves everyone this way. Maybe there is nothing particularly special about me at all. Maybe I’m taking something that comes naturally to him and making it mean more because I’ve never experienced it before.

But then there are all the ways he has loved me that feel impossible to dismiss. He has loved me through my mood swings, through the difficult moments, through versions of me I struggle to love myself. He has been patient when I expected frustration, gentle when I expected distance, and present when some part of me was already preparing to be left alone. And through all of it, he has made me feel more loved than anyone ever has in my entire life.

The strange thing is, he has never actually told me he loves me. At least not in those words, not in that way. And yet, this is the most loved I have ever felt.

Maybe that’s what makes it so damn sad. To finally experience the kind of love I spent my whole life wondering about, to finally know what it feels like to be cared for so deeply that I don’t have to question whether it is there, and still not know what I get to do with all of it. To have something feel so much like love without ever being able to call it mine.

Maybe some of the greatest love we experience in our lives doesn’t arrive with the certainty we thought love was supposed to have. Maybe sometimes it simply arrives, holds your hand, loves you in every way that matters, and leaves you wondering how something that makes you this happy can also make you this sad.

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Personal

“Making you happy makes me happy.”

He says it while holding my hand, and it is such a wonderful thing to hear. Not simply because someone said it, but because for once, I know he means it. I feel it in the way he holds my hand, in the way he looks at me, and in all the little things he does without ever needing to be asked. Being with him feels like being in his haven, like I’m somewhere I am wanted, cared for, and adored, and it is so unimaginably wonderful.

Because I had never met a man who treated me like this. And after a while, I had started to believe perhaps I never would. Maybe the kind of love I had spent my life dreaming about asked for too much. Maybe the bar I had set existed only in my imagination, and eventually I would have to accept that real life simply didn’t work that way.

And then I met him.

And somehow, he has undone so much of what life had taught me until then. Things I thought I had to accept, things I thought I had to settle for, things I had convinced myself simply did not exist. He heals parts of me without even knowing they needed healing, simply by loving me in ways I never imagined I would get to experience.

I could write endlessly about how good and wonderful a man he is, about all the little ways he makes me feel loved, and I still don’t think I could quite capture what it feels like to be on the receiving end of it.

Sometimes I look at my life with him in it and think, I’m living a dream.

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