To the one who taught me love and loss

To A, Whom I Knew in the Shadows of Youth

A true life story, my first love story

There are names that become chambers in one’s mind—silent rooms, echoing with ghosts and yours, A, is one of them.

We met in a time when the world was still forming itself around us, as malleable as our intentions, as naive as our hearts. We called it love, though in truth it was a kind of beautiful confusion, an affliction we were too young to resist, too foolish to navigate.

And yet, there was love so raw and unfiltered, almost frightening in its intensity. I remember always rushing to get home from school just so I could text you, planning an imaginary future together(I’ll still name my son aubrey), fighting over misunderstood texts because you read meaning into every word. I wrote you letters I never sent, carved poems into the corners of my notebooks. Up until last year i still told my friends you were the one. There was a night I prayed, not to God,but to the universe, that you would stay safe even if not with me. That, too, was love. Not the kind that demands, but the kind that aches in surrender.

I believed, then, that words could hold weight without injury. I believed my affection could exist separate from my cruelty.

I was wrong.

There is a violence in words spoken in youth, sharpened by ego, by fear, by the desperate desire to be understood without understanding oneself. I wielded those words like a child with a blade, and you, you were the one who bled. You said you forgave me but you never really did.

And then the silence—cold and long and necessary. In those years, I imagined we had ceased to exist in each other's worlds, as if two people could unlive their shared history by simply not speaking of it. But time, in its cruelty, does not heal—only buries.

Fate, that greatest puppeteer, saw fit to bring us back into each other’s orbit. Not as lovers, but as remnants. Survivors of a war we fought against ourselves and lost. We spoke again. We even laughed. But beneath it all, the rot remained. We had never truly escaped the past; we merely danced around its grave.

The romantic feelings died quietly, without ceremony. And now, the friendship is dying too—slowly unraveling, you have always been slipping through my fingers, fingers that never fully held you to begin with.

You were never mine, not really. I loved the version of you that lived in my imagination, and perhaps you did the same. The real us;clumsy, wounded, burdened…never stood a chance. There is no tragedy in that. Only inevitability.

You dealt me my first deck of heartbreak, You were the first to teach me the quiet violence of love, how something so tender could unravel the soul so thoroughly. You arrived not like a storm, but like a shadow that slowly swallowed the light, until I could no longer tell if the darkness was yours or mine.

There are days I still feel the ache, not as pain, but as a dull echo, a presence in your absence.

No, I have not healed completely; I fear healing implies forgetting, and I remember everything.But I have chosen, at last, to forgive myself — for the naivety of my longing and for loving armed with a heart unarmed.

This forgiveness is not freedom, but it is the only shelter I can build from the wreckage.

I write this not in the hope of resurrection, but as an act of mourning. For the girl you were. For the boy I was. For the silence that always seemed louder than our words.

Forgive me for loving you poorly.

Forgive me for writing this at all.

I miss you.