2025, First Text.

The clock on my desk flickered to 12:01 AM, its soft glow carving shadows into the walls of my room. Outside, the world was bursting into celebrations—fireworks painting the sky, distant cheers echoing through the streets, the occasional crackle of laughter spilling from balconies. But here, in the stillness of my room, there was only the hum of my thoughts and the faint vibration of my phone, the cursor blinking against her name.

"I love you."

Three words. A confession. A declaration. A prayer. I typed them slowly, as though they might collapse under the weight of their meaning. My thumb hovered over the send button for an eternity. Would it ruin everything? Would it make me smaller in her eyes? Would it make her leave?

But when you’ve carried a love like this—quiet, relentless, and all-consuming—you learn that silence is the heaviest burden of all.

I pressed send.

The seconds stretched into an ache. I stared at the message as if willing it to disappear, to undo itself before it reached her. But then the tiny grey ticks turned blue. She’d read it. My chest tightened, my breath caught. Somewhere, someone burst a balloon outside, its sharp pop ricocheting through the air, and I flinched.

Her reply came after eight minutes. I counted every one of them.

"Why now?"

Two words. A question that held a thousand unspoken answers. Why now? Because I couldn’t carry it into another year. Because every moment I spent with her—her laugh, her voice, her maddening habit of tying her hair with a pen when she couldn’t find a scrunchie—made me love her more. Because the spaces between us were growing too vast, and I was afraid one day she’d slip through the cracks.

Because I love her.

I typed and erased my response four times before finally settling on, "Because it’s true."

The dots that signaled her typing appeared, then vanished, then reappeared again. My heart thrummed against my ribs like a trapped bird. When her message finally came, it was a single sentence.

"You know I can’t love you back."

I read it once. Twice. A third time, hoping the words might rearrange themselves into something softer. They didn’t. They never would.

I closed my eyes and let the weight of her reply settle over me. It wasn’t a surprise; I’d known this truth for as long as I’d loved her. She’d never led me on, never given me false hope. She was kind like that—kind enough to stay, to talk to me when I needed her, to acknowledge my love without returning it. But kindness is a double-edged sword, and tonight, it cut deeper than ever.

Still, I couldn’t stop myself. I opened our chat again and typed: "I don’t need you to love me back. I just need you to know."

This time, her reply came quickly. "I do know. And I don’t deserve it."

I laughed bitterly at that. How could she not see what I saw? The way she made the world feel lighter just by existing. The way her presence turned ordinary moments into memories I clung to. The way she made me want to be better, to be enough, even though I knew I never would be.

I typed, "You deserve everything beautiful of this world."

The dots appeared again, lingered, then disappeared. She didn’t reply. Maybe she didn’t know what to say, or maybe she knew that no words could fix this. Either way, the silence that followed was deafening.

I sat there, staring at the screen until the fireworks outside began to fade, until the world grew quiet again. Somewhere, someone was waking up to a new beginning. Somewhere, someone was holding the hand of the person they loved, stepping into the year with hearts full of hope.

But not me.

For me, the year began with an ending. An unspoken goodbye wrapped in a confession that could never be returned.

And yet, as I put my phone down and leaned back against the wall, I felt a strange sense of peace. She knew. She might not love me, but she knew. And sometimes, that’s all you can ask for.

The rain began to fall softly against the windowpane, each drop a quiet reminder that some things are beautiful even in their ache.

I closed my eyes and whispered her name into the stillness, my first and last prayer of the night.

"I love you."