nini ‘︿’

It was never silence that she needed; it was warmth. It was never space that she yearned for, but presence. Because she isn’t the type of person who’d crave the punishments she grew up with that still haunt her to this day. She doesn’t want silence, because it reminds her of the deafening coldness from her father whenever she does something wrong. She doesn’t want space, because it’s a cruel reminder of how her mother would go on for days, weeks without talking to her, just because she couldn’t be the perfect daughter. She fell in love to finally have the warmth and love she couldn’t receive back then when she was a mere child. She fell in love so she could finally have company, someone who chooses her the way she chooses others without hesitation. She didn’t fall in love to have the same gnawing loneliness pull her into the void she once desperately tried to crawl out of.

But what if love is actually that easy? What if love really is rainbows and unicorns? What if it was never you that was the problem — you weren’t being too difficult to deal with, you weren’t asking for too much, you weren’t being too much to handle, you weren’t too much of anything. You were just asking the wrong person. You were just loving the wrong person. You just opened your soul to someone who was meant to be a lesson and treated them as if they were the main character instead of one of the extras in your life.

“No matter how badly he hurt and scarred me, he is — and always will be — my better half. My soulmate. I loved him then when I was young and hopeful and quite naive, and I will continue to love him until the end of my days when I’m old and slow and wise enough to know better.”

There are no words in the English dictionary that can ever begin to describe the pain of missing someone that you still see everyday. How it breaks your heart to see the same person but know that they are no longer the one you once loved the most. To see eyes once filled with love now look back at you with indifference. To hear very little words from the voice that once spoke to you endlessly until you fall asleep. To feel so unloved, unseen, unheard, unimportant to a person who once held you like you’re their most prized possession, like you were the greatest miracle in their life.

I was never a religious person. But somehow I catch myself praying to all the gods I know, begging every single one of them to make us work. Begging them to give me the you that loved me. The you that cared and respected and valued me.

“To someone hurting, something is everything.”

Perhaps that’s the one mistake that I have done — attaching myself to you so much to the point where I became incapable of living without you by my side. To depend my happiness and will to live on you, so much so that I end up curled up on the floor, lifeless, whenever you independently live and experience your life.

Losing yourself for the sake of keeping someone in your life is a pain no words could ever begin to describe.

A pen and paper is the writer’s best friend. For only those two things can lend an ear without any judgement or desire to oppose your opinions. For only those two things can open their arms and welcome the writer’s emotions and cradle it until it ceases to exist. For only a pen and paper can provide the writer a space to be vulnerable and maintain an intimate secrecy between a human and its darkest, gut-wrenching, eye-opening, heartbreaking thoughts.

The kind of heartbreak time could never mend isn’t the person who left you after years of being together. It isn’t the person you fell in love with the second your eyes met. The kind of heartbreak time could never mend is the person that could have been. It’s the person you almost had — the person who was once at an arm’s length — but pulled away when you finally decided to take the leap. It’s the person who keeps you up at night with all the possibilities, all the what ifs, all the should’ve beens.