They say true love never fades. I believe that now. It didn’t vanish when we parted. It simply settled in the corners of my memory, persistent and uninvited. It etched itself into the walls of my soul and quietly rearranged the way I would ever love again. It quietly lingered, like a scent in an empty room, a warmth in the space where you once were.
Nine? Ten years? Nearly a decade. And still, I remember you with a clarity that frightens me. Even in your absence, your presence distorts me. The look on your eyes, the sound of your laugh, the shape of your hands, the way the world seemed to bend slightly when you entered a room. Time has done little to blur you. I know we were never meant to be. And yet, even now, I find myself whispering to God in the silence, asking Him for just one more crossing of paths.
But every time I pray for your return, I am answered, not with grace, but with dark, relentless visions. Nightmares that never end kindly. They remind me, not of promises broken because you never made any, but of truths unspoken. You were never cruel outright, never malicious. But there is a quiet kind of cruel damage in being loved insufficiently, imperfectly...
You didn’t break me. But loving you cracked something open in me that never healed. And what haunts me most is not what we were, but what we could never be.
How dare I let unspoken words and unfulfilled stares unravel the architecture of my life? But I did. Somehow, I did. It wasn’t a grand betrayal or a tragic ending. It was the silence, the restraint, the moments that almost became something. The ache wasn’t in the memories we made, but in the ones we never got to. The ones I imagined. I gave my grief a name, a form. I mourned a ghost, and in doing so, I forgot to live fully. They say you can't lose what you never had. But I did. And the loss has never stopped echoing.
And still, there’s this small, unreasonably tender part of me that still loved you. Loved you purely, dangerously, wildly, without instruction or guardrails, without pause. What am I to do with that piece of myself?
Perhaps the cruelest truth is this: no one knows about you. You’ve been my secret ache, my silent ghost, buried beneath years of silence and survival. I spoke your name only in prayers. I carried you like a hidden flame, tucked away where no one could judge or extinguish it. You became the unspoken measure by which all others are found lacking. No one ever stood a chance.
I am alone without you and I am better for it. But better doesn’t mean painless. Sometimes, the ache of healing is worse than the wound itself.
They always said I was like a bee, joyful, tireless, always in motion. I was the brightly buzzing one, full of promise, warmth and resilience.
But no one ever tells you that bees die when they sting. And I did.
The moment I gave you my heart, something within me gave out a soft, irreversible collapse. I kept smiling but inside, the buzzing faded. The sweetness remained on the surface but the part of me that once loved so freely, so fiercely never returned.
I know exactly where the sting landed. And I know what it cost me.
From Sunshine to that fifteen years old boy with red hair,
From N to Y,
I love you from afar, even when my eyes can no longer find you, may my prayers always arrive.