A Love That Never Was

I told her.

And she smiled—not with joy, not with pity, just with understanding. A quiet acknowledgment, as if she had always known but was waiting for me to say it.

She didn’t love me. But she didn’t run from it either.

She let my feelings exist. That was all I had wanted then.

But now they tell me—forget and move on.

Forget?

What exactly should I erase?

The moments that never unfolded but lived in the spaces between my thoughts? The glimpses of a life where she turned toward me instead of away, where my name carried weight on her lips?

Do I unwrite the stories I built in my mind—where evening light framed her like something out of a dream, where laughter felt like a melody composed just for me?

Should I abandon the unspoken understanding I imagined we shared? That fleeting second when our eyes met, when I let myself believe she saw me the way I saw her?

Erase the warmth I never felt, yet somehow memorized? The way I thought she might fit against my shoulder, the way I wished her presence lingered long after she left?

Forget the softness in her voice when she said my name? Not with love, not with longing, but with familiarity—the kind that was enough to keep me hoping, and cruel enough to never mean anything more?

Yet here I stand.

Caught between letting go and holding on to the echoes of something that was never mine.

But you know what? It doesn’t hurt the way they think it should.

It’s not a wound. It’s not something I want to rip out of my chest and throw away. It’s not the kind of sadness that breaks—it’s the kind that lingers, like the last note of an old song, fading but never quite gone.

We can destroy a house built on land. Tear it down, brick by brick, until nothing remains. But this—this was never built on land.

This was built in my heart.

And you don’t burn down something that beautiful, even if it was never real. You let it stay. You let it live, like a quiet warmth on a winter morning, like a whisper carried by the wind.

And someday, when I think of her again, I won’t flinch.

I’ll smile, a small, knowing smile—a secret between my heart and me. A testament to a love that lived, if only in the quiet chambers of my soul.