I Don't Love You Anymore PDF

 Copyright © Rithvik Singh 2024 All Rights Reserved. e-ISBN 979-8-89277-741-4 This book has been published with all efforts taken to make the material error-free after the consent of the author. However, the author and the publisher...

 Copyright © Rithvik Singh 2024 All Rights Reserved. e-ISBN 979-8-89277-741-4 This book has been published with all efforts taken to make the material error-free after the consent of the author. However, the author and the publisher do not assume and hereby disclaim any liability to any party for any loss, damage, or disruption caused by errors or omissions, whether such errors or omissions result from negligence, accident, or any other cause. 9 s0 While every effort has been made to avoid any mistake or omission, er this publication is being sold on the condition and understanding that ad neither the author nor the publishers or printers would be liable in lre any manner to any person by reason of any mistake or omission in ba this publication or for any action taken or omitted to be taken or lo advice rendered or accepted on the basis of this work. For any defect G in printing or binding the publishers will be liable only to replace the @ defective copy by another copy of this work then available. Cover Design: Tanmay Gawade  For my mother, My heart is a ower at your feet. ank you for being the only person who always loves me, even at my worst. is book will make you feel too many things, all at once. Just like life does sometimes. Dear reader, I love you. And I hope you love yourself enough to leave anyone who breaks your heart. Your heart was meant to be worshiped, not turned into a war zone. I hope this book feels like a warm hug to you. I wrote this book for the ones who feel everything too deeply. You’re right. I wrote this book for you. If you ever knew someone who loved you enough to be terri ed of losing you, I hope you know it’s rare to nd someone like that. Someone who would leave owers on your dining table, kisses on your forehead, and the scent of love in your heart. Someone who would gently hold the pieces of your heart on days when life gets too hard. If you ever knew someone who loved you the way the sky loves its stars, I hope you didn’t end up breaking their heart. And if you did, I hope life breaks your heart, too. ere are forests of feelings inside you. May you nd someone who knows how to water your soul. Someone who not only notices your absence but also hates it. Someone who never lets you question if there’s something fundamentally wrong with you—if you deserve to be loved. Someone who loves you as if that’s what they were made for—loving you with all their heart. Someone who makes you fall in love with the days you didn’t even think you’d be alive to see. Someone who never lets you give up on yourself by giving you all the love you deserve. ere’s a dying patient who has fallen in love with life. An orphan who thinks his parents are still alive. A soldier’s wife waiting for a letter from her husband who died. A wilted ower waiting for spring to arrive. We’re all so different but so alike—wanting things we cannot get, praying to a God who refuses to listen. Your heart is a crime scene. ere are old letters stacked on the shelves. e place reeks of memories. ere’s blood in every corner, but there’s also love. So much love. More often than not, the person you wouldn’t mind burning cities for is the same person who wouldn’t mind leaving you in the re. You wouldn’t mind taking your life for someone who wouldn’t stop taking you for granted. My heart is a monastery in the land of atheists. Prayers don’t make sense to them, but all my prayers aren’t for them anyway. ey’ve always been for you, only you. It takes years to let go, they say, but how many years? How many years before I nally make coffee in the morning and not add extra sugar to it because you liked it that way? When will I go to the mall and not spend an hour at the bookstore because you loved books more than you loved me? When will I stop taking pictures of the sky as it changes color and saving them to a folder I wish I could send you? When will I start loving roses more than sun owers? When will I stop letting my life be yours, knowing you’re not mine anymore? It’s not the same for everyone, you see. It took you a few seconds to let go, but it’s taking me a lifetime. e owers you gave me are kept between the pages of books I’ve loved all my life. I pretend not to love you anymore, but catch myself opening those books every once in a while. ey treat you like a room they visit on random days. You don’t have to lose yourself for someone whose love comes in waves. Some people are like songs stuck in your head. You miss them like you hum that song—unknowingly but constantly. You don’t remember the lyrics, but you don’t know them well either. All you know is that you cannot get them out of your head. Without me, you’ll never run out of mouths to kiss, but you’ll always run out of love. Always. Honeybees would be jealous, you’ve got a voice so sweet. ere are owers in our irises that bloom every time we meet. May your grief leave you with empathy—enough to make kindness your home, come what may. You’re not the kind of ower that can be plucked and put in someone’s hair. You’re the kind of ower people nd too pretty to pluck. e kind of ower that deserves to keep blooming. We’re in a pastry shop, and your voice is the sweetest thing there. ere are mulberry trees outside, but I cannot shift focus from your eyes. Love is over owing inside you; I see it shining through your eyes. Sometimes loving someone feels like an autumn that refuses to leave. at’s when you know it’s time to let go. You’re a letter of hope in a concentration camp. A solitary ower in a barren land. ere are poems stitched into your soul. Flowers blush when you touch them, I’ve been told. You’re everything magic in a world too ordinary. e kind of person people write novels about. I will always be a stranger to what goes on in your heart. I’ll always keep wondering if there’s room for me in it. It’s no less than magic, you see, what your presence does to me. ings are hard with people who don’t love you hard. People whose love isn’t the ocean but its waves. e ones who always leave you confused. ey don’t tell you that they love you, but they also don’t accept that they don’t. ey hold your hand but refuse to hold your heart. ey lend you space in their heart, but they don’t let you stay in it. ere are people who will come back to you only after the world has pushed them away, and there’ll be someone waiting with owers at your doorstep despite hundreds of voices around them begging them to stay. Choose wisely. You’re at the airport, hugging them goodbye. You knew it would hurt, but it hurt a lot less when you had imagined it. Each step is taking them away from you. You’ve left your fragrance in the scarf they’re wearing. In their hands, which you wouldn’t be holding for a long, long time. Behind their ear, where you blew them kisses. In that blue shirt they wore way too often because you loved it. ere’s so much of you they’re taking away with them, but you cannot go with them. You want them to stay, but you feel like a bird with feet wrapped in wires. ere’s more sadness in you than in the morning paper. You love them too much to not let them grow. May your healing turn you into a river after rain. I run out of words when you’re around, it’s true. I write for a living, but I live for you. I remember everything about you, but nothing that I loved you for. I remember you laughing after seeing me in pain, hanging up calls, and smashing the door in my face. rowing hot tea at me, watching me sit in a corner, drenched in anxiety. I remember you sleeping in my arms and talking about someone else. Taking me to the movies and using a dating app while holding my hand. Trust me, I’ve a hard time letting go of people, even after they show me they don’t want me anymore, but my heart remembers everything you did to me. All because I loved you. All because I believed, for once, someone wouldn’t choose to break my heart. But it’s been long since I’ve been sad, months since I’ve cried on the bathroom oor. Trust me, I’m glad I don’t love you anymore. ere’s a little sadness in your heart when you hang up the phone after talking to them for hours. You hug them for a few more minutes at the metro station before saying goodbye. You spend ten days with them but cannot stop wishing for an eleventh. You’re in love with them—the way they move their eyebrows mid-conversations, the way their crooked teeth make the most beautiful smile, the way they laugh for hours about the silliest jokes, and the way their eyes widen and shine when they see your face. Never let them go, okay? ere are poems I’ve written about being in love, and poems I’ve written about being in pain, it’s strange how they all read exactly the same. Love for you has always been a person, it’s tragic how that person has never been you. I’ll watch 9 episodes of a show in one day, but keep postponing the last one. When things change. When fate changes. I avoid watching it. I try not to make it to the end. I bury my curiosity and start another show. I go out and meet a friend. I do everything I can to not let the show end. But I know I’ve got to face the ending, no matter how much it terri es me, or how far I try to run away from it. I know the show has already ended. I know the ending won’t change. is is not about shows. I’m not the kind of person who wishes good for people who’ve wronged me. My mother spoke to you with owers in her mouth, but your words were thorns that pierced her heart. You don’t deserve to be happy. I held you on days when even the sun refused to bring you light, but you abused my kindness and left me alone that night. I hate what you did to my heart. When I needed you the most, you left me alone with my fears and ghosts. I’m sorry, but I’m not angelic enough to mind seeing you in pain. is is what you deserve. is is all you’ve gained. Love It’s in having tea at midnight with someone who is used to having it at night, only to give them company. In forgetting the distance between cities and crossing it with a smile on your face — only to put a smile on the face of the person you love. Seeing a ower shop and immediately getting a few for someone. Sitting on video calls at night and not talking to each other because you’re both tired, but never being too tired to not make some time for each other. Holding hands in busy streets and holding them tight at the end of a busy week. It’s in refusing to let distance change your feelings. In ensuring that love never leaves. You’re at a hill station, and there’s too much fog to see the sun, but that doesn’t make the place any less beautiful. Just because your path is unclear doesn’t mean light doesn’t exist. It doesn’t mean the journey isn’t beautiful or worth it. Your heart becomes the heaviest thing to carry when it’s over owing with love for someone who always leaves you feeling unworthy of love. Your eyes tell me what he’s doing to your heart, there were sun owers in them the last time I saw you, and now, they’re all wilting apart. Someone who has been loved by grief all his life will of course fall in love with the person who makes him smile, because you can grow roses in the backyards of mansions full of empty people with ease, but it’s special—when the ood breaks the last ower in a garden and someone picks it up, puts it in a vase lled with water, and looks at it with affection, the ower doesn’t survive, but at least it feels loved again. You ask me if I’ve ever been loved before, and I tell you, I’ve loved and I’ve been left—nobody has ever stayed long enough to ask me this question. I detest your presence. I’m too scared of what your absence might do to me. I’ll always be the rst one to open my arms for you, and the last one you’ll choose to hug. I’ve been clumsier than ever since the day we met. I’m carefree now— knowing I’ve found someone who is careful with my heart. And when you’re tired, don’t think twice before falling into my arms. I’m tired too, but I’ll never run out of love for you. You would forget to add hearts to good morning messages. Disappear for hours without a reason. Suddenly be mad at me, mid-conversation. Go to sleep knowing I’m anxious. I’d sit the next day in the car with you, quietly. You wouldn’t ask me what happened, and I was too scared to tell. I had told you I overthink a lot, and you ensured I never stopped. Your soul will turn into a shooting star, every inch of your being will shine for them. I’ve been watering a rose plant for months now, and today, I nally saw a rose in it. But for you, I’d pluck my favorite ower, break all its petals and arrange them to write your name. For you, I don’t mind breaking things—be it a ower, be it my heart. My past selves are buried inside me. ey cry to resurrect when I try to give love another chance. You’re so used to apologizing to people and begging them to stay that when someone apologizes to you for hurting your feelings, you’ve no idea what to say. Tragic how your feelings have never mattered to anyone before, how people have always found it easier to walk away. Your absence has created cemeteries in my soul, there’s so much of me that doesn’t exist anymore. Our love is a sinking ship in the middle of the ocean. If we must stop loving each other, life must stop loving us too. ere’s a perfume bottle in my room. Mom says it smells like autumn, but I know it smells like you. ere are nights when I wish you could move your ngers through my hair and tell me about your day. I’d wake up smelling just like you. But I know all your days are bright without me. I know you don’t hold onto me in fragrances, among other things, the way I do. Your colors cover all the corners of my heart. ere are shades of you in the way I talk. ere’s so much of you in the morning sky. How do you expect me to forget you when you are synonymous with beauty for me? When everything beautiful is everything you are. When everything gorgeous will always remain a little less gorgeous than you. e truth is, you’re everywhere around me and within me—even though you’re not in love with me anymore. Your absence did so much to me, but it couldn’t undo how I feel about you. I want to send you the poems that rip my heart apart and write you poems for when your heart gets too heavy. Turn your soul into a sun ower eld and ensure you never run out of light. Love you on the days when life stops making sense and also on the days when it does. Hold you closer than the moon holds its shine, the ocean holds its depths, and temples hold statues of the divine. ere are people who love you, but not in the way you love them. eir love is platonic. And when you fall in love with such people, they push you away instead of asking you to stay. Not because they don’t care, but because they care too much. Because they know how much your heart would break if you didn’t walk away. Because they know your feelings aren’t butter ies that’ll die in a few weeks. ank them for teaching you how to save someone by not being there to save them. By letting go of them, even if it breaks their heart— to save them from further damage while always wishing them well, but from a distance. Trust me, staying in touch with someone you’ve unrequited feelings for is the worst thing you can do to your heart. Nothing breaks hearts quite like the silence of loved ones—a quiet declaration that they’re tired of trying to love you for who you are. And when they refuse to choose you, choose distance. Because staying won’t make a difference. I know those feelings are precious, but, my love, so is your heart. So is your heart. Loving someone shouldn’t feel like a tug of war where you’re always ghting for their attention. It shouldn’t feel like a race you’ve to win, at the end of which lies the trophy of affection. It shouldn’t feel like a sale at a store where there are too many people wanting the same person you want. It shouldn’t have to feel like a ght or war. You shouldn’t have to constantly struggle to make space for yourself in their heart. If there are too many people they’d rather be with than you, they don’t deserve to be with you. Love is not a trophy you’ve to ght for but a gift someone wants to give you every day without you having to ask them for it. You’ve the spirit of a bird. Falling doesn’t stopyou from ying. And that’s what I love the most about you—you always keep trying. You can never teach your heart to be okay with saying goodbye. Losing them will make you cry—sometimes for weeks at a stretch. It will make you lose a little faith in love and people. But losing them shouldn’t make you give up on the magic of healing. Of letting hope re-enter your heart. Of wanting to be okay again. Of learning to live without them and smiling just the way you used to with them and before them. ey’ll always matter to you, but you need to choose yourself for yourself, and for the people you still matter to. When someone is breaking someone’s heart, do they forget that the other person loves them? Do they not think about what they’re doing to the person’s heart? Does sleep not elude them, knowing someone isn’t okay because of them? Are they too used to breaking people to care about how they’re going to deal with it? Do they not have a heart? You’re staying with them because you’re scared of being heartbroken, but tell me, aren’t they already breaking your heart every day? Writers think they’re too powerful until they realize they can write poems all they want, but that person still won’t feel the same way about them. Expressing your feelings is a superpower, you see, but sometimes your feelings can leave you feeling powerless, too. Your life is a book of poems written in advance. You don’t get to edit, only live. And some poems are like that—they tear your heart apart, but there are enough poems in the book to ensure you’re okay at the end. I found so much of me after you left, the shrinking of me was the cost of staying with you. Trust me, I’ve been feeling my feelings so freely since the day I stopped having feelings for you. My mother’s smile is so beautiful, my father must hate that about her for he never let her smile for too long. She buried her dreams to make space for us to belong I wonder how much pain lives within her I wonder how she manages to stay this strong. My heart is made of art. e poems may not make sense to you, but they’ll always make you feel something. Always. If you ever miss me, know that I’ve loved you in sentences and silences, prose and poetry, thunderstorms, and the peace that eventually comes. I’ve loved you more than I’ve loved the ones who’ve loved nobody more than me. I’ve loved you on days when my heart was blooming and also on days when it was breaking. I’ve loved you with the kind of sincerity that can make anyone wonder what they have done to deserve a love like that. It was you who couldn’t value it, any of it. And now, I can’t value you anymore. ere was a time when you were the rain to my owers. You learned the language of my soul, but today, we don’t care about each other anymore. Today, you’re like rain to my desert. We seldom meet. e owers in my chest don’t bloom anymore. Your sadness stopped the sunshine from entering your heart, so I walked in instead. — I hope you let me stay. Some people enter your life to teach you that not everyone who extends a helping hand has their heart in the right place. I went to a store, and a signboard said, “If you break something, consider it yours.” ings have a way of belonging to you, even after you break them. e way I still belong to you, despite everything. Love is in paying attention to the things that add sparkle to their eyes and turn their cheeks amingo pink. Love is in ensuring you do those things more often. Just because the darkness has stayed a little longer than you thought doesn’t mean it’s in love with you. You were made by the sun to add light to the world, not to surrender to darkness and call it your home. You sleep with a book by your side and not a laptop. You water owers instead of plucking them. You write poems in your journal instead of forwarding memes. You leave notes on the dining table instead of texting me good morning. You hold me close instead of checking your phone. You never nish a show alone. You still wonder why I am in love with you, when I know the stars would divorce the sky to marry you. You deserve to be loved the way the sun loves the earth— someone who shows up everyday and brightens your day without you having to ask for it. Someone who makes you believe that despite the storms and despite the rain they’ll always come back to you, they’ll always stay. You’ve spent so much time hiding your heart and running away from yourself that whenever someone holds you gently, you cry. You said you loved me, but you did nothing to make me stay. I told you what others did to my heart, and you left me feeling exactly the same way. It’s tragic, isn’t it? When someone new enters your life, you don’t appreciate how much they love you, as much as you wonder if someday, just like everyone else, they’ll stop loving you, too. It hurts me to think that it didn’t hurt you when I left. at it, in fact, made you feel better. at my presence in people’s lives is a weight on their shoulders, and no amount of love from my end can ever change that. I’m not the person you left behind, the one whose heart carried nothing but love for you, where there was no space for anyone new. Because what they say is true, you can love someone with your whole heart and still leave them behind, once you nally realize ever since you gave them your heart, you’ve not been all right. My heart was the snow you buried your footprints in. You’re always with me even when you aren’t. My favorite color will always be that of the sky before storms, that of my life before you. Letting go is hard when there’s so much love inside you, dying to belong to them. e way a tear drops from both our eyes when it’s time to say goodbye shows how the only thing keeping us away from pain is each other. When the world doesn’t want to love you, I hope you don’t stand with the world. ere are jasmine owers in your garden that bloom even on days when you’re not around. Even when there’s nobody present to appreciate them. Your mother wears her favorite sarees, even though your father never tells her she looks pretty. e world can refuse to love you, but may you never stop being the rst person who makes you smile. I’m glad I didn’t end up with you, I can’t imagine my life without this person, who has made all my dreams come true. When you enter a small cafe and everything there smells like history. A past too deeply stitched to be separated from its existence. ere are tiny postcards kept on tables and old clocks hanging on the walls. I wonder how many lovers have entered this place before, held hands, madly in love with each other. You see, some places are like that—you can’t help but write poems about them— they just refuse to leave your heart. When we’re together, things can be out of place, but our hearts are always home. Loving me is like loving heartbreaks, because that’s what I’m made of. I carry my heart on my sleeves, and my soul dies to run in your direction, but I’m too scared of what loving you might do to me. You see, my heart protests against love, but also dies for it. With you, I was drowning and catching for breath as you laughed at me— always closer to death than life. Without you, I’m the entire ocean, brimming with endless life. I’ve bettered the art of leaving people, but I’m yet to learn how to take my heart with me. You serve your heart to them on a platter once again, hoping they’ve changed, but the only thing that changes is the way they choose to crush your heart. e method changes, but the pain remains. It’s going to rain tomorrow, my mom says, and it de nitely rains the next day. Ma is good at predicting who is going to break my heart, too. But I am always too in love to listen. Loving the wrong person can feel like a storm to some, and when they cannot escape it, sometimes they end up spending their entire lives, hopelessly waiting for the sun. Let your love for yourself be the tapestry that decorates your heart. You know you don’t want them in your life, but you still can’t help but reach out to them. You send them that text, you call them on random days, and you miss them anyway. You know, even if they came and put all the love in the world at your feet, you’d still not want to be with them. ey’ve hurt you enough to make you stop wanting them, but you just need enough distance to make you stop loving them, too. My life with you was a half sun-lit room. Your love always brought me darkness in equal measure as light. And the pain never fully left, so I did. In love, we must turn into owers. Withering isn’t a part of love, only blooming. I would sew a whole new sky, if this one refused to let us y together. I’d do anything to be with you. I’ll sit down one day and not use a semicolon to talk about us. I’d use a full stop. I’d accept that there’s nothing more left to our story. Let me be the petals that adorn your soul, and don’t ask me to leave, the world nds us beautiful together, and I’m terri ed of being alone. I’m not ready, but it’s time, to leave you where you are, and love myself as I am. I’ve lost countless summers trying to be the sun to your soul, but you’ve made me feel too terribly lonely to ever regret leaving you alone. e happiest moments of my life were with you sleeping in my arms—eyes closed and hands wrapped around my waist. is is what my arms were made for, you see, holding you close to me and never letting you go. When you enter a bookstore and unexpectedly nd that one book you’ve been looking for since forever—that smile that covers your face on seeing it—if the same smile doesn’t cover their face whenever they look into your eyes, it’s not worth it. It’s not easy to say goodbye to someone who has stayed with you while you said the hardest goodbyes. When love breaks your heart, you go to your best friend, but when your best friend breaks your heart, you’re left with nowhere to go. Seeing you with someone else still suffocates my heart. I want you to feel loved, but I don’t have the courage to see your hands holding someone else’s when my ngers are dying to intertwine with yours. If I were a ower, you could see my petals fall apart, one at a time, seeing you look into his eyes. You cannot see my heart break, but that doesn’t mean I’m all right. It’s like you’ve swallowed mountains of pain and they’re now a part of you. Why do your eyes have so much pain in them? Tell me, what do I do to take it all away? I’ve grown because of people I’ve grown apart from. I still love with my whole heart, but I no longer let loving someone leave me feeling lifeless. At the end of the day, the stars in the sky and the stars in my soul will continue to shine, with or without someone. If you’d let me, I’d love you more than all the ctional characters you’re so deeply in love with. Pluck all the owers in the world and turn them into an endless carpet for you to walk on. Cage stars into boxes, gift-wrap them, and send them to you. Love you in oceans, and always fathom your depths. If you’d lend me a little space in your heart, trust me, I’d make space for us in every literature textbook. ere are poets dying to write about a love like ours; let’s make their wishes come true? I’m incredibly good at goodbyes, I told you. To convince myself that it won’t hurt when you leave. To convince you that I’m not too madly in love with you to let you go. e person you’re running towards has run out of love for you. You can run all you want, but that version of them doesn’t exist anymore. And I know it hurts, but it’s time for you to stop loving them, too. To nd someone who isn’t afraid of your storms. To nd someone who was always meant to be your sun. Moving on isn’t about learning to love someone else. It’s about going about your day without thinking if that person is thinking about you. When feelings are ooding inside you, remember that oods consume and break things. Don’t let your heart be one of them. You’re not the light that guides people back home. You deserve to be the person who is someone’s home. Not a glimmer of hope to take them out of the dark, but a permanent place brimming with warmth for both of you to stay. Spending even a day without you terri es me. As if my life is a game of Jenga and you are the only wooden block keeping it from falling apart. I’m learning to accept that falling is a part of my journey, but you’re de nitely not my destination. And I’ll let go of you, even if that means having to start from scratch all over again. Someone can have the biggest heart but still refuse to make even a little space for you in it. ey can be capable of loving someone enough to turn them into a Pablo Neruda poem, but not feel anything for you at all. You can love them enough to decorate your heart with everything they love, paint every inch of your soul with their favorite colors, but that won’t change how they feel about you. Sometimes people don’t want your love even when you believe there’s nobody capable of loving them as intensely as you do. e truth is, there are some feelings you’ll always feel alone, and one day, you’ll stop trying to make them feel the same way as you do and give your love to someone else— someone who knows how to value your heart. Remember that one breakup text you didn’t send for the longest time because you cared about that person more than yourself? ey were taking you for granted, but you didn’t want to break their heart. You kept saving them, at your expense, until one day you decided to hit ‘send’ and let it go—only for them to say that it was you who never cared about them. e people you love are often the ones who end up making you feel horrible about yourself. You were in fth grade when that relative told you your skin tone isn’t ideal— you’re not smart like your sister and don’t have much to offer. You were in seventh grade, and by that time, the message had been repeated so many times that you started believing it. at friend who ‘jokingly’ told you that you cannot get dates and kept talking about how she, on the contrary, could get anybody she wants. You were at a wedding, and your father told you how that out t looked funny on you. Nobody talks about how difficult it is to love yourself when the people around you constantly make you feel unworthy. You may be the kindest person in the world, but that won’t ensure the world is kind to you, too. Self-love doesn’t come easily to most people, and in most cases, the person has nothing to do with it—it’s the people around them that are responsible for the same. Funny how we love to hate the people who failed to love us back. What good is this heart if it cannot be with the person it beats for? You lose friends and you don’t even notice it until you see an old photograph of you and them, and realize that they’re not in your life anymore. at friend who sat next to you every day in middle school. at friend whose landline number you still remember. Friends with whom you played during the ‘games period’ in school. Friends you shared your lunch with. e ones you invited to your birthday parties when you were little. It’s strange how we just lose people over time—even the ones who were once the closest to us. Unrequited love is painful, but sometimes you make the pain grow deeper by not accepting that there are thousands of stars in the universe, but some stars just aren’t yours to wish upon. Healing isn’t about love as much as learning to deal with the absence of it. ere’s so much learning that takes place because of leaving. But there’s so much loving one has to do before nally learning to leave. Waking up without you kills the sun in my soul. Only darkness is here to embrace me in your absence, please come back home? Sometimes, reminders of lost love would pelt you like a sudden downpour, and it would become tough to hold yourself together. In such times, you’ll learn how even the most beautiful memories can grip you by the throat and strangle you, but you can still hold onto hope and go on to live because you’re stronger than you think. – note to self I’ve gotten better at saying goodbye ever since you left. Funny how someone who didn’t have feelings for you can make you stop feeling too deeply for anyone ever again. Funny how someone you didn’t want to let go of taught you how to be okay with watching people leave. You’re so used to their presence that, despite knowing it’s been months since they told you they don’t love you anymore, you wake up in the middle of the night hoping to nd them sleeping next to you. You miss their arm around your waist. It’s been a while since they’ve pulled you closer to themselves, but you’ve never allowed your heart to be pulled away from them. You’re not used to dreams anymore because sleeping without them is a nightmare nobody prepared you for. You want them to reach out to you, but you know they’ve moved on. You want them to see the love dying to slip through your ngertips and fall into their heart. You want them to know that every night hurts a little more than the previous one, and you don’t know how many more nights you can afford to spend without them before it hurts too much to survive. What nobody tells you is that when you’ve to let go of someone you still have so much love for, it kills you from the inside. I may never nd the kind of love you offered to me, but I hope I nd the kind of love I’ve always dreamt of having—the kind of love that was too much for you to give me. e kind of love that’s greater than a bird’s love for her wings. e kind of love that transcends everything you were too scared of. e kind of love that doesn’t leave you yearning for more but ensures you’ve got a wide smile on your face every day. You told me that you loved me, but you couldn’t ever love me the way I deserve to be loved. My heart can’t belong to you if you choose to make it feel heavy on some days and lighter on others. My heart can’t bloom in places where storms seldom stop and the sun shines only when it’s convenient. I’ve got a heart that has loved gentleness for too long to settle for a love that makes me feel heavy. I’m afraid there was never space in your heart reserved for me. ere was just space, and you’d be okay with anybody else staying there, too. Whenever I’ve fallen in love, it’s been one-sided. I’ve dated people. I’ve lived with them. I’ve spent Valentine’s Day with them and taken trips with them. But whenever I’ve fallen in love with them, it’s been one-sided. I’ve got the habit of always feeling more than the other person. I author my own pain by always giving out more than I ever receive. What terri es me is the possibility of feeling so deeply for someone once again that I’m physically incapable of not talking to them or reaching out to them despite knowing things are over. I don’t want to feel the kind of love that ends with me trying to cope with a seemingly endless autumn that I’ve almost died coping with before. I hate how now whenever someone tells me that they love me, I tell them that they don’t. I’ve started considering the words I love you as something people say to each other way too often without being certain if they’re going to stay with each other. When there’s too much sadness inside you, you try to go back to the source of your sadness because they were once your happiest place. Please don’t go back to them. Reaching out to them will only water your sadness; it won’t make it wither away. Sometimes the person who used to be your happy place doesn’t want you to be happy anymore, and you can’t do anything about it other than slowly learning how to be happy alone. You’ve kept hundreds of books, movie cassettes, old perfume bottles, and thousands of photographs. ere’s room for so many things, but no space for me. You’re capable of so much love, but you still choose not to love me. I’d cry in front of you, and you’d hug me, so I’d stop. If you cared about me enough to hug me, why didn’t you care enough to stop hurting me? When someone asks me what I am most afraid of, it’s not the things that have never happened, but the ones that I’m scared will happen again. Like my father not being nice to us. My relatives telling me all those things I wouldn’t say to someone, even if they broke my heart. Being loved and left again. Crying silently—head buried in my pillow, so nobody would gure out I’m in pain. I’m not scared of the unfamiliar, but of the things that have happened too many times to me to ever get over them. e intimacy of lying in bed together and doing nothing. ere’s music playing on the laptop, but we couldn’t care less. Your head rests in their arms as if it’s the only place it was meant to be. You realize you’ve not felt this safe since you were little. You realize this is all you’ve ever wanted—the comfort of being held by someone who you know won’t hurt you. I love the questions that begin with, ‘Remember when’. Remember when we were too drunk to even walk straight? Remember when I called you at 3 a.m. to ask about how you make your special noodles? Remember when we stayed up all night trying to nd a movie but ended up rewatching episodes from our favorite sitcoms all over again? Such questions are proof that someone remembers us. at the memories we create with some people mean just as much to them as they mean to us. at they also cherish the bond we share. Girls like you deserve picnic dates and kisses in dusty libraries. Books wrapped in old newspapers with handmade bookmarks inside them. You deserve little owers in your hair and a lot of hope in your heart. Long walks on silent streets. Dancing in the rain after the world has fallen asleep. ‘Good morning’ messages and random ‘I miss you’ texts. Girls like you deserve love that turns you into the sky after rain. Don’t settle for anything less. Boys like you deserve owers and soft kisses on your cheeks. Handwritten notes and snapshots on your refrigerator. Coffee that’s a little too sweet and pancakes with extra maple syrup. You deserve love in its softest form— someone who holds your hand on busy streets, hugs you on nights when you cannot sleep, and tells you you’re going to be all right when life gets too overwhelming. Boys like you deserve love that feels like sunshine. Don’t settle for anything less. If you enjoyed reading this book, please write to Rithvik at @wordsofrithvik on Instagram. He’d love to hear from you! Also by the author: Warmth  About the Author One of the most popular writers on Instagram, Rithvik’s words have never failed to comfort his readers. His words feel like home and refuse to leave your heart. His rst book, ‘Warmth’ was published in 2021, and it was very well- received. Rithvik lives a simple life and wants to inspire people to hold onto hope and love themselves more. You can connect with him on Instagram: @wordsofrithvik.