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?
She Was Sea 