MORE THAN CASUAL

No matter how many love stories I read, none of them could ever compare to what I feel for you.

I wish this could be one of those stories with a beautiful, happy ending, the kind where two people somehow find each other at exactly the right moment, where everything that stands between them eventually falls away, and where love is enough to make two people choose each other despite everything that tells them they shouldn’t.

But sadly, ours isn’t that kind of story.

This isn’t a love story.

Not really.

It’s a story about what happens when you fall in love with someone who was never meant to stay, and about how easily a few insignificant moments can become something enormous when you are desperate enough to believe they mean more than they actually do.

It’s about every little thing that made me believe there was something between us—the looks that lasted a second longer than they should have, the touches that were always accidental but somehow never felt entirely accidental, and the goodbyes that seemed to take both of us longer to say than they should have.

It’s about the things you did that I carried with me long after you had probably forgotten them, because somewhere along the way, I started giving meaning to moments that you may have never intended to mean anything at all.

And maybe that’s where I lost myself.

Maybe I didn’t fall in love with the man you actually were.

Maybe I fell in love with the version of you I created in my head—the version who would eventually choose me, the version who would look at everything that existed between us and call it what I did.

Something more.

Maybe that’s why letting go was so difficult, because I wasn’t only letting go of you; I was letting go of every possibility I had built around you, every version of the future I had quietly imagined, every moment when I had convinced myself that if I just waited long enough, you would eventually see what I saw.

I wanted to believe that one day you would wake up and realize there was something between us worth fighting for, something that deserved to become more than stolen glances and lingering touches, more than long drives and songs playing quietly between us, more than all the things neither of us had the courage to say.

But the truth is, you never promised me any of that.

You never told me there would be a future.

You never asked me to wait.

I was the one who turned every little thing into a possibility, because sometimes hope is easier to hold onto than the truth.

And maybe that’s the cruelest part of all.

Because to you, maybe it could have been casual.

Something temporary.

Something that could exist without promises, without expectations, without the weight of feelings attached to it.

But to me?

It was never casual.