Have you been in love?
Have you ever loved someone so deeply that the world softened at the edges whenever they were near?
Where time didn’t feel like something that moved forward, but something that wrapped around the two of you ?
It felt like standing at the center of a quiet universe, didn’t it?
where every step you took together echoed with certainty.
as if holding their hand wasn’t just affection — but love dressed itself as an armor — like somehow, that love had made you invincible.
And the future that once felt like a question had turn into a promise as long as your souls are tied.
It felt great, right? How the world blurs around the both of you, how holding each other’s hands gives you the kind of strength that makes you feel you could walk through every possibilities and conquer all challenges life has prepared.
You build your world in that kind of love — pure, real, feels unbreakable.
You’ll build your sanctuary — not with bricks, cement, nor woods —
but with laughter, dreams, and the fragile sketches of promises, of “someday.”
You imagine a home that doesn’t exist yet, but feels real enough to live in.
those thousand tiny tomorrows stitched together into something that looks like forever.
And then —
in a random Sunday morning —
it slips.
The cruel part was, it didn’t leave immediately. It didn’t hurt you directly all at once — instead, it sharpens itself in your mind and slowly — deliberately pushes it inside your ribs so you could feel the agony of every second, every small, painful realization that something is loosening and you can’t stop it.
Love can be cruel as that.
One day, you’ll notice the cold, the indifference that feels impossible
for someone who once memorized the rhythm of your laugh.
Like you hadn’t spent years dreaming of holding hands until both of them wrinkle with age.
Then next, the ringing silence —that somehow says more than words ever could—then follows, your world slowly turning monochrome.
Too unfamiliar for something that was used to be full of laughter and light.
Then suddenly, everything you built — every dream, every promise, every whispered “always” and “someday” — collapses like a house made of glass.
And you’re left standing there, hands still half-open, holding nothing but the echoes of “what once was.”
Have you ever been disappointed by love like that?
Because I have.
in a way that hollowed everything I had —
in a way that made “forever” feel like a word people say when they don’t yet know better, because I do now.
Have you heard a song that goes
“maybe we get married someday, but who knows?”
And I remember hearing that and thinking — yes.
exactly that.
and exactly the moment a quiet, dangerous hope
planted itself in my chest.
Because really, who knows?
From that point on — from what I had to go through to recover,
I told myself I don’t believe in marriage anymore.
in love.
in permanence.
in the fragile illusion of happily ever after.
And I got good at saying it.
The words will come out naturally like it’s something I had rehearsed in front of a mirror over and over, until I perfected the tone that will make it sound like the truth — something they won’t have to ask again because it sounds certain — because certainty is easier to perform than vulnerability.
Because I’m afraid — I was never good at lying.
But beneath that well-practiced prose, is someone who longs, aches, and yearns but is too broken to believe again.
I pretend I’m immune to the idea of forever, but sometimes I catch myself — in unguarded moments — imagining the soft rituals of two lives who vowed at the altar with hands intertwined — sharing a cup of tea cooling on the table as we watch our favorite morning shows on a tv that we bought together — the familiar silhouette waiting at the doorway every time one of us come home after a long day — and that, that gentle certainty of a hand that knows how to find mine in the dark, a promise so deeply understood
it no longer needs words.
And maybe that’s the cruelest part of all — that even after everything,
after all the breaking, all the unlearning — some part of me still hopes
love like that might find me again.
