IF SORRY HAD PAGES

If sorry had pages, I would have left yours unread on the bookshelf-and saved myself the years spent turning them.

I wish I could go back to my eighteen-year-old self, the girl who believed that love should feel like a comfort zone, a safe refuge, not silence or emptiness. I would love to warn her against loving so hard on someone who would later become a scar, a wound in the flesh that she would learn to live with or to trace without pain.

Our scar didn’t happen suddenly. It crept in as charred paper at the margins before anyone smelled the smoke. You were never cruel in noticeable ways, and maybe that was the cruelest trick I had to experience from it all. You were deliberate and persuasive, so that even your silence felt natural, as if it were something I should learn to live with for the rest of my life.

The first “page” you actually owed me was my birthday. You didn’t try to call or text, nor did you acknowledge it. But I kept waiting and convincing myself there would be a surprise later, that something big and thoughtful would explain the delay. I even imagined you planning something romantic in secret, turning your absence into a source of anticipation.

But nothing came after the long wait.

Two days later, you remembered it and laughed it off as if forgetting the day I was born was insignificant. I sat there staring at my phone, waiting for an explanation that never arrived. I told myself it was nothing to read meaning into. Everyone forgets sometimes, so I turned the page for you.

After that came another—the slow erosion. Unfinished fights you refused to resolve, conversations you abandoned midair until I learned to carry them alone. My feelings became an inconvenience you tolerated rather than truths you held. Anytime I tried to show you how much it weighed on me, you would soften your voice and tell me I was overthinking things. You were good at that… making me doubt the extent of my own pain.

Still, I stayed with you.

I held on to the version of you I had created in my mind, never the man who stood before me, but the one I kept rewriting into something better. I believed love meant patience, and patience meant endurance until something clicked.

But it never happened.

Then came the day of my mother's funeral.

The air at the memorial house was too heavy to ignore, pressing against my skin like a storm cloud refusing to break.

People's voices moved around me in low pulses, distant and blurred, as if I were standing just outside my own world.

My hands wouldn’t stop trembling, and I kept clenching them together, trying to hold myself in place, trying not to break in front of everyone.

I looked all around for you,

And once again, you were not there, not in the doorway, nor in the corners I kept checking. Not even the smallest sign of being there; I kept hoping as time passed by.

But I was met with just emptiness, and unmistakable space where you should have been.

At first, I told myself you were late. Later, I told myself you were coming. Then I stopped telling myself anything at all.

My chest tightened in slow pulses, each one making it harder for me to breathe. I swallowed the grief down again and again, but it kept rising anyway, louder than anything I could ever control.

And then something in me went still.

It wasn't peace, nor was it acceptance, just a quiet freezing, like a part of me had finally stopped expecting to see you.

I just knew you weren’t coming.

Not today, not when everything inside me was breaking in the way I couldn’t explain to anyone standing beside me.

I stood there much longer than I should have, staring at the space you should have filled, and realizing I had spent years reaching for someone who never reached back while I was already falling apart.

That was the moment I decided to let go.

Not because my love vanished or disappeared overnight, but because I finally understood that love without presence is just endurance disguised as hope.

From then on, every “I’m sorry” and every “It won’t happen again” felt like another page in a book I never agreed to be the author: brief apologies, empty promises. The same ending is rewritten again and again.

The hardest truth wasn’t that you hurt me, but that I kept hoping the next page would heal what was already broken by you.

I was too young then, at eighteen, to understand that love should not shrink nor limit you.

Too hopeful to notice that I was being slowly made smaller, quieter, easier to overlook. I mistook endurance for loyalty and silence for peace.

If I could be allowed to speak to her now, I wouldn’t tell her to stop loving you.

I would tell her to stop losing herself inside it instead.

Because I finally realized now that I was not holding on to you.

But I was holding on to a story that refused to change, even as I passed through many phases of life.

And when I finally closed that book, I did not break or fall apart.

I came back to myself.