I wish I hated you more than I loved you

When I was seventeen, I thought the hardest part of growing up would be watching people leave.

Eight months after my first love ended, I realized I had misunderstood what goodbye really was. Saying goodbye lasted only a few moments. The difficult part came afterward, when life continued as if nothing significant had happened. I still went to school, laughed with my friends, worried about deadlines instead of late-night conversations.

From the outside, there is very little to suggest that a quarter of my life ended eight months ago. Yet now and then, I still wonder where four years go.

Four years is an impossible amount of time when you are only seventeen. It is long enough for someone to witness you becoming a different person without either of you realizing it, for your routines to become inseparable, and for love to stop feeling extraordinary because it became ordinary.

Every relationship has a beginning, though most of us only recognize it in hindsight.

If someone had asked me then when ours began, I would not have known what to say. There was no single conversation that changed everything, no dramatic confession, no unmistakable moment that separated friendship from love. 

There were only evenings that somehow refused to end. We’d say goodnight, disappear for a few minutes, then return with another story, another question, another excuse to stay awake a little longer. Looking back, I don’t think either of us realized we were falling in love. We were simply becoming part of each other’s days.

Somewhere along the way, reaching for my phone became a habit. Whenever something good happened, she was the first person I wanted to tell. Whenever life felt too heavy, she was the first person I looked for before anyone else. By the time I realized she had become part of my everyday life, I could no longer remember what my days had felt like without her.

I still remember the first time we met in person. The dismissal bell had never sounded so far away. I spent the entire afternoon glancing at my watch during PE, knowing that once class ended, I’d finally meet someone I had spent months getting to know. By the time I reached the mall, I had imagined that first meeting a hundred different ways.

None of them came close to the warmth of that first hug.

For four years, our relationship was built from moments that never seemed important while they were happening.

Every time we met, we exchanged handwritten letters and promised not to read them until we got home. We spent more time laughing than singing inside karaoke booths, squeezed ourselves into photobooths until the camera flashed, shared food because everything somehow tasted better from the other person’s plate, and wandered through the same mall often enough that we no longer needed to decide where to go next.

She visited my hometown countless times. I had lunch with her parents once. She gave me a plushie that I named Luna because I have always loved the moon. Somewhere in my closet, there is still a hoodie she forgot to take from me.

None of those moments felt remarkable while they were happening. They were simply our life. Looking back now, I think that’s what made losing it so difficult. We never imagine that the ordinary days are the ones we’ll end up missing the most.

People often ask what happened between us, and I have spent months trying to answer that question without making our love story smaller than it was.

The truth is nothing dramatic happened. There was no betrayal, no explosive argument, no single mistake that ended everything. If anything, we loved each other the best way we knew how. We learned to apologize, to communicate, to celebrate each other, and to remain present through disappointments. 

The problem was that I was fighting battles she could never fight for me.

Long before our relationship ended, I had begun struggling with my mental health. Every day, I told myself that tomorrow I would become the version of myself she deserved. Some days looked like progress. Other days it looked like surviving until tomorrow. Through all of it, she stayed beside me.

She used to tell me she would wait. For the longest time, she did. Waiting quietly became part of our relationship, something we accepted without ever asking how long it could last. 

When she finally admitted she was getting tired of waiting for what felt like nothing, I remember staring at those words for a long time, hoping I would find a reason to disagree with her. Instead, I realized I couldn’t. She wasn’t telling me she had stopped loving me; she was telling me that loving me had become heavier than either of us knew how to carry.

We still tried several times. We talked, promised each other we’d figure things out, and searched for the version of us that had once made everything feel effortless. Every conversation ended with hope, but every attempt brought us back to the same place. It slowly became impossible to ignore that the problem was never whether we loved each other enough.

We did.

The problem was that neither of us knew how to keep loving each other without slowly hurting the other in the process.

That was the cruelest part of it. If one of us had fallen out of love, the ending might have made sense. If there had been another person, a betrayal, or a reason to hate each other, perhaps moving on would have been easier. Instead, we were left with something much more difficult: two people who still wanted the same future, but could no longer become the people that future needed.

In the end, our goodbye was not a choice between love and leaving.

It was a choice between holding on because we loved each other, or letting go because we loved each other.