There’s a strange humiliation in desire with no destination. When your heart chooses someone who leaves their door unlocked, but never actually opens it. Wanting them feels less like longing and more like a dare. How much of yourself can you offer before the wanting starts to wound you?
How can a person occupy so little space in your real life, yet colonize your mind like they’ve signed a lease? You don’t crave their body as much as you crave their certainty. They never promised you anything, never claimed you, never asked you to stay – and yet you linger as if devotion were a subway platform and their name is the last train of the night. And the worst part? You convince yourself that if you were just a little more – more patient, more chill, more interesting, more whatever – they might finally choose you. People talk about unrequited love like it’s tragic and poetic. It never feels that way. It feels feral. It feels like you’re starving in front of a feast they have no interest in sharing. You keep insisting you’re not hungry, while drooling over a menu that was never meant to feed you.
You’re not in love with them, you’re in love with the version of yourself that they almost saw. The one that flickered for a moment. You glimpsed who you could be with them, and now your imagination won’t stop replaying it. They don’t reject you. They just never choose you. And somehow, that hurts more. So you start offering yourself in silent ways: laughing at their unfunny jokes, agreeing with opinions you don’t share, editing your edges so you don’t scratch their comfort. You learn their patterns like scripture: when they look at you, when they don’t, how their attention warms you like a spark that appears and vanishes, leaving you colder for having felt it at all. You become the scientist of your own delusion, collecting evidence that they might feel something, if only, if ever, if someday.
At some point, the ache starts speaking in full sentences. It whispers that you are not chasing love; you are chasing proof that you are worth choosing. All it takes is one moment, one sentence, one absence, one casual cruelty, to reroute everything. You don’t wake up enlightened; you wake up depleted, but in that depletion is clarity. And that is where freedom begins, not with forgetting them, but with remembering yourself. With stepping off a platform where trains never stop. Because love is not supposed to be a riddle or a wager or a wound, and unreturned desire is not a failure. It’s a compass. It points you, relentlessly, back to yourself.
