Life Has a Habit of Catching Me Off Guard

 

I woke up convinced she had texted me.

It lasted only a few seconds. Just enough time for my brain to build an entire future around a notification that never existed. It is strange how little hope requires. A single message. A single vibration. A single "Hey." Suddenly the world feels different. Then I opened my eyes. There was no message. Only that familiar silence waiting for me on the other side of sleep.

I spent the morning trying to understand why this one dream managed to undo months of apparent progress. I had already said goodbye. Didn't I? I blocked her. Deleted the pictures. Deleted the screenshots. Deleted every little digital relic that kept me emotionally tied to someone who no longer belonged in my life. I even wrote an entire farewell to her. I closed the chapter so carefully that I genuinely believed there was nothing left inside me worth grieving.

Apparently, grief disagreed.

I cried today.

Not in the poetic sense people write about. Not the single tear rolling down your cheek while dramatic music plays in the background. I cried until breathing became difficult. I cried until my face hurt. I cried until I had to stop wondering why I was crying because I no longer had enough energy left to ask. Hours passed. At one point I even recorded myself, and I still don't fully know why. Maybe because I wanted proof that this really happened. Proof that beneath all the philosophy and productivity and routines, there was still a human being capable of breaking apart.

The strange part is that I don't think today was entirely about her.

Or maybe it was never really about her.

Somewhere between the sobbing and the silence afterward, another sentence escaped my mouth.

Nobody ever fights for me.

The moment I heard myself say those words, everything became older.

This wasn't simply the grief of losing the elephant.

This wasn't about a failed confession or a relationship that never became what I hoped it would become.

This was about something that has quietly followed me for as long as I can remember.

The feeling that I am always appreciated, but rarely cherished.

People tell me I am kind. Intelligent. Funny. A good friend. A good listener. Someone they enjoy talking to.

It is amazing how lonely compliments can become after enough years.

Nobody dreams about "the good friend."

Nobody loses sleep over "the good listener."

Those people are loved in a very safe way. The kind of love that asks nothing and risks nothing. The kind of love that quietly assumes they will always be there.

And maybe that is the part that hurts.

Not that people dislike me.

Sometimes I wish they did.

At least hatred has urgency.

Indifference is much quieter.

I think what tafukt gave me wasn't simply love. In fact, I'm not even sure she ever loved me the way I loved her.

What she gave me was something far more dangerous.

Hope.

For the first time in years, I genuinely believed someone had chosen me.

Not because I was useful.

Not because I was convenient.

But because I was... me.

When that possibility disappeared, it felt as though the universe had corrected a mistake.

As though life whispered,

"That wasn't meant for you."

Maybe that's why this grief refuses to leave.

I'm not mourning only a person.

I'm mourning the version of reality in which I believed I could be deeply loved.

That is a much heavier thing to bury.

For months I kept telling myself I had healed. Looking back, I think I confused healing with distraction.

I drowned myself in junk food. Movies. Pornography. Endless scrolling. Staying awake until sunrise. Sleeping through entire afternoons. Constant noise. Constant stimulation. Not because I consciously wanted to escape, but because silence always seemed to carry something I wasn't ready to meet.

Then, over the past couple of weeks, something changed.

I fixed my sleep schedule.

Started eating properly again.

Started working consistently.

My head became... quiet.

Clear.

And almost immediately, the grief came back.

Funny.

Nobody tells you that a healthy mind sometimes hurts more than an exhausted one.

The moment my brain stopped struggling just to survive, it finally had enough space to remember what it had been postponing.

Later today I reread an article I wrote about her months ago.

I've read it before.

Many times.

Usually I could read every sentence without much happening inside me.

Today I couldn't make it through the second paragraph.

Nothing in the article had changed.

I had.

Or maybe whatever had been protecting me simply stepped aside.

I keep thinking about something that has happened to me again and again throughout my life.

Life has this irritating habit of catching me off guard.

Every single time I begin believing I've made peace with something, it quietly reaches into the past and reminds me that peace and numbness are not always the same thing.

Maybe healing isn't linear.

Maybe it's not even forward.

Maybe it circles.

Maybe every return carries a slightly different lesson.

Or maybe that's simply another beautiful story I tell myself because stories are easier than admitting I have absolutely no idea how this works.

I don't know anymore.

I've become suspicious of certainty.

Every time I confidently declare, "I'm over this," reality smiles politely and proves otherwise.

The strange thing is...

Tonight, after crying for hours, I actually feel lighter.

Nothing changed.

She didn't come back.

Nobody suddenly chose me.

The loneliness is still here.

The questions are still here.

My life is objectively the same life I woke up in this morning.

And yet...

Something inside me feels less tense.

Almost as if grief had been knocking on my door for months while I kept pretending nobody was outside.

Perhaps all it wanted was to be let in.

I used to believe emotions became dangerous only when we felt them too intensely.

Today I'm beginning to suspect the opposite.

Maybe they become dangerous when we refuse to feel them at all.

I don't know whether I'm healing.

I'm done pretending I know.

But today reminded me of something I desperately needed to remember.

Beneath all the books I read, the philosophies I admire, the productivity systems I build, the routines I obsess over, and the carefully constructed image of someone who has everything under control...

There is still a lonely human being who desperately wants to be chosen.

I have spent years trying to philosophize that desire away.

Today I finally admitted that I can't.

And perhaps honesty, painful as it is, is still a better place to begin than another comforting illusion.

After finishing this, I went back to proofread it. Somewhere around the middle, I found myself tearing up again. Not because I had written anything particularly beautiful. Quite the opposite. Because, for the first time all day, I was reading these words as though they belonged to someone else. And I realized how much pain that person has been carrying without fully admitting it.