Selfless Love

I lied. I did disappear due to the lack of instagrammability of my life. You know by now I always share the real deal, but somehow writing the sad sappy stories become a harder mission every time. It took me two months to write this post because none of the words I used really made my feelings justice, it is probably the one thing that remains unspoken on PB because I spent too long feeling ashamed of it. The last months have been hard: I struggled to get my work permit, lost a job I was very excited for and broke all ties with that same old love. As much as life trained me to brush it all off my shoulder, having to get through this one took more time than I expected. So, I bought myself a pair of shiny ankle boots and flew all the way to Barcelona while the city was in the middle of a politic revolution. It almost felt ironic that Spain and I were currently going through a similar heartbreak where we had spent years holding on to someone who had given up on staying a long time ago. Love has always been something I shy away from, both in my life and my writing, because it is the one aspect of my life that makes me feel like a complete loser. I must have missed the memo to follow the millennial dating guide: Fall in love, Fall out of love, Shake it out, Repeat a hundred times. And man, that sucks because instead of living la vida loca, I did the one thing you are not supposed to do: I stayed in love with the one that got away. I wish this was just the typical “I fell in love with an asshole” kinda situation because if it had been that way, I would have given up a long time ago. I fell for someone whose heart was just as complex as mine. Someone who could understand and relate to all crazy things life had put on my way. That was a first to me, it was almost too good to be true to find someone I didn’t need to hide all that darkness from. However, our whole journey was filled with red flags and obstacles. No matter how hard I believed in it and tried to hold on to it, everything and everyone signalized it would end. When it did, it’s like we both started acting unlikely to who we really were. He said I couldn’t be part of his life anymore, I acted like it was ok. Like I didn’t care, like I didn’t love him anyway. But It wasn’t ok. I wasn’t ok. I had grown to feel so whole and new but it was all reversed once he was gone. Somehow I convinced myself that I wasn’t important enough to him to change his mind, that part of genuinely loving someone is to actually accept their desires independently of your own. So I let go, life went on and he moved on with someone else. Even though my head kept giving my heart a million reasons to do the same, there was this little voice within me that was convinced that he was my meant to be. Maybe it was because we used to be very close friends or maybe it was because I was astonished by the fact that no matter how hard we tried to keep distance between us, life kept to stubbornly push our paths to reconnect. It felt like no matter how many times we said goodbye, hello was always around the corner. It messed me up. I couldn’t understand how my feelings could remain the same after so many years filled of lows, so I forced myself to stop feeling. Because feeling so much isn’t easy, because it gets crazy, because it gets lonely. Ironically, I grew to be strong enough to boldly voice my feelings to the world but every time life gave me a new shot to tell him the truth, I simply couldn’t. I couldn’t voice how hurt I was when he coldly pushed me aside, how pissed I was when he came back to my life as if nothing happened, how stupid I felt every time I played it nice and polite instead of telling him that we weren’t ok, but mostly, that none of it seemed to matter because nothing seemed to make me fall out of love with him. While I thought silence was my way to let him be happy, it became clear that it was my way to protect myself from seeing him leave my life permanently. I knew that if that ever came to happen, I would shut down. And I did because when the goodbye of goodbyes ended up knocking at my door, history was repeating itself; I let him go without a hint of my true feelings. If I let him go the first time because I was terrified of rejection, I let him go the second time because I refuse to continue giving selfless love to someone whose acts proved to be nothing but selfish. I once might have been a kid who felt so worthless she would accept the smallest proof of affection but I grew to be a woman who knows her worth well enough to stand up for her own. By now, if you can’t see I’m the real deal, I’m not going to be one to hold you back.

So I went home and cried it all for the last time (thank god for my momma). I didn’t cry because of the plot twist, I cried because I blindly followed my gut and my gut turned out to be wrong. I cried because I settled for nothing while I knew I deserved everything. I cried because I was stupid enough to repeatedly allow the same person turn my world upside down and disappear, leaving me unable to put my heart into anything or anyone else. I cried because no matter what I do and no matter what I push myself to think, part of me will still always love him. That’s the curse of selfless love, you are the only one to blame because you were the one to silently stay without expecting anything in return. You were the one to allow someone to be so central that you totally forgot that the one person you needed to make happy was yourself. You forgot that life isn’t meant to be stopped and that feelings are not meant to be silenced. You forget everything until it all breaks for real and you remember. You remember that life meanwhile gave you so much, you became better as a person, stronger as a woman, bolder as a voice and that none of it, absolutely none of it has to do with him. As hard as selfless love turned out to be, it made me whole on my own. And that, as long as it took me to realize, is perhaps the best ending I could have ever written for myself.

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WHAT I’M WEARING TODAY: AMERICAN EAGLE Top // ZARA pants // STEVE MADDEN Sandals // GUCCI Bag

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Pictures by Mikayla Khuen