I Chose You And You Lied

I chose you.

I chose you – completely aware of how this entire thing, if broken, would crash down on me.

The day you told me you felt something for me was the day I learned courage. Because it took every single ounce of courage within me to give us a shot.

In my first experience with love, I’d been broken. It was unrequited love. And his mind games tired me to the point where I didn’t even want to fall in love for a very long time. I was scared, messed up – undeniably shattered, even.

I vowed to never love someone who didn’t love me.

But you, my conscious decision, changed everything.

When we first talked – not in my wildest dreams did I imagine that you’d be the one to teach me how to fall in love again, how to trust again. I never thought that I’d find someone who’d be so incredibly different from what I thought I wanted. We were so different. It took time for to understand you, to understand what you wanted out of what we had. Maybe I still haven’t understood it. Any of it.

But I tried.

I looked at you and I knew that you were worth every ounce of effort that I put into us. The days I spent asking you what was wrong when I felt you pulling away, the times I tried to coax you into talking to me about how you felt – it was merely so I could understand you enough to know how to love you.

We all love differently. We’re all different people.

I wanted us to weave our own story – even if it never matched any of the popular romances that I’d read and told you about.

You mistook my dreamy love towards romance in novels as something that I might have incorporated into my expectations of us. I never wanted us to be a replica of what I’d read in my favourite romance. I wanted us to make mistakes that were our own, I wanted us to want each other in the way that we could – not in a way that a book showed.

When I’d decided to be with you – I’d known that it wouldn’t come easy. I knew that our differences would keep us on our toes for a quite a while. Not to mention the physical distance between us. The odds were far from perfect. But I never wanted perfect. I never wanted ideal. I wanted messy. I wanted real. I wanted fighting and then getting back together and getting to know each other better, loving each other better.

You once told me that I was worth knowing – but then you stopped trying to know me. You said you loved it when I said whatever I felt – but then you started disliking how expressive I was. You said you thought I was rare and pure – and then you told me that life would trample me over because of my ability to get hurt by what you did.

And not once did you ever look at this from my perspective – you still thought that I asked for too much, that I said too much. You made me feel as if there was something wrong with me, with how I loved.

You told me you felt the same – and then you told me that you were just trying to feel the same.

So, all the nights filled with discreet confessions of affection, the phone calls, the video calls, the shared smiles, the first date – it was all a mirage, a front you put up while you tried to figure a way out of us. You were always ready to bail, to give up. I’d seen it already but I just refused to see your lack of commitment as lack of feelings. You kept hinting, in one way or another, that you feared this, too. So I just deemed it to be lack of courage.

And so I tried to make you stay. I tried to love enough for the both of us. It tired me down. But I just had so much to give because every time I looked at you I saw nothing short of a miracle.

You’d called us a miracle too, once. And I believed you. I believed your words because I thought you knew how much words meant to me. I write. Every word I said to you – I meant it with every fibre of my being. But not you, never you.

It showed in how you callously threw away what we had – without even an ounce of remorse. It showed me exactly how badly you’d wanted to leave. It showed me how you never really felt the same because you don’t hurt the people you love. You don’t ask for their heart just to throw it away.

And for a moment there, you messed with my perception of myself. You made me feel embarrassed of myself. You made me feel so incredibly stupid for having trusted you. It took me a while to realise that your actions reflected more of how you were and less of the things that were wrong with me. I was never the one lying to you when we were together. I was never the one who projected my own indecisiveness on you to make you feel as if you were unworthy.

I never made promises I couldn’t keep.

But you were careless. You didn’t really mind leaving a casualty behind as you recklessly lied and whispered sweet nothings. You watched me fall in love with you when you had absolutely no intention to stick around.

You knew that my trust was the biggest thing I could give you with my heart – you broke the former without a thought. The latter, though, is strong enough to survive you.