When I was a child, I believed in it completely.
I believed in it the way children believe in things before the world teaches them better — with the whole of myself and with the kind of certainty that lives in the body before the mind learns to be afraid. I watched it in every film, every story, every song that played too loudly from a passing car window on a summer afternoon. I absorbed it through every fairy tale that ended with two people choosing each other in spite of every obstacle, every distance, every difference.
I wanted that. I wanted it so badly it felt like hunger.
I built an entire future in my imagination — the gray hairs, the rocking chairs, the grandchildren gathered at my feet asking, “How did you know? How did you know it was real?”
And I would smile the smile of someone who lived fully and loved recklessly and I would say: “I just knew. And I was brave enough to say so.”
But that future requires a beginning. And I am standing here, older now, and I’m realizing —
“What if the love story was never written? What if it is just another dream I could never reach?”
What if the beginning was a thought that stayed unspoken, sealed behind my teeth, swallowed back down every time I almost let it surface? What if the ending is not a dramatic goodbye, not a tearful airport farewell, not even a conversation — what if the ending is just a story that lived and died inside my chest, so quietly that the world never even noticed a funeral had taken place?
There is a particular kind of tragedy in that. In mourning something that left no evidence. In grieving in a language no one else speaks.
