Each time she swore it was going to be the last time. 

She couldn’t doubt it really: she set the stage for the last goodbye pretty perfectly, saying another version of the words she had already said, expressed once again what he meant to her, hoped one more time that maybe one day they will cross paths again. 

Maybe. 

And then he drove away again, and she went home.

The next day, he calls her again. But he doesn’t love her. And yet, that doesn’t stop her hope to spark up again. And the vicious cycle continues. 

That is what it feels like, loving someone who doesn’t love you back. You keep running in circles.

Last time it happened, you swore to god that you will close your heart, seal it all up, harden it so that none can penetrate it. 

You don’t want to fall in love again, let alone fall in love with a person who doesn’t reciprocate your feelings. 

Because who wants that in life? Who wants to experience the excitement of romance, the jitters, the birth of new hope only for them to be dashed? But more importantly, who wants the constant reminder of what could have been, constantly seeing the person that you love so much and yet can’t be with, except as friends? Who wants to be in that constant pain and feeling of rejection, over something that they always wanted but never got?

Who wants to fall in love, alone?

When you love someone who doesn’t love you back, there is a lot of trying from your end. There is an array of permutations and combinations of change in behavior, changing the hairstyle, to do some of that less, some of this more, all in the hope that maybe, maybe something will work. 

It is worse when the other person was in fact into you once upon a time and then just lost interest. And you are standing there thinking, “Oh but I am still right where I was, only now there are a thousand metaphoric knives going in and out of my body, and it feels like someone is clenching my heart so hard that I don’t think I can ever breathe again. Tell me what can I do to fix this?” 

Because you keep hoping that something’s going to change. You build that sliver of hope into something bigger in your head and think that if you wait around long enough, something will happen for sure. 

But it always gets me, how we manage to end up there. Sometimes I think it is all our fault. You know, we build the whole thing up in our heads, or we perceive it to be something that it isn’t. But we do worse, we don’t see the actions of our object of affection as they are, we see them the way we want to see them. So disconnected we are from reality. 

But you know what absolutely blows? When we choose to be that way; when we choose to remain in that state.

Why? Oh, because she did smile at me a little longer than usual, he insisted he dropped me back home and made sure I was home okay, she really came out of his way to see my parents, he did speak to me until 3 AM last night. And they are just so right for us. 

Or that is what we keep telling ourselves. Every time we decide to move away, to put in some distance, we aren’t really doing it. We only go as far as for them to give us some teeny, tiny hint that they miss our presence or they need us, and we run back at the speed of lightning. 

All we want to know is that they need us enough to keep torturing ourselves over it, because love is a winding hard road isn’t it? What comes easy in life anyway?

Until one day, we stop. We get tired, exhausted from being constantly sad all the time, drained from all the thinking, the playing it out in our heads. We get tired of all the chasing, only to realize that all we are doing is trying to convince ourselves of something we pretty much know is false. 

That’s the thing, until we reach that point ourselves, until we realise that we need to let go, we don’t and we won’t. No matter what someone says or does, even if that person we are so in love with shows us that they are not as keen as you are, we don’t believe it until WE do.  

That’s when we realise that we can’t change the world with a song, can’t make someone love you if you kiss them enough and long. 

So we be strong, and let go. And we stare at them long enough, kiss their cheeks one last time, and say our goodbyes. And this time, we don’t stare after them, waiting for their cars to turn around the bend. Because we are already gone.