Maybe in another life

The lost letter my first love will never read.

My dearest R.S.,

I love you. I sincerely, deeply do. You are my first love—the one who fractured the stone perimeter I built so carefully around my heart.

I have never been a person who allowed herself to fall easily, or cheaply, or without calculation. I spent a lifetime treating my heart like a clinical domain, ensuring every border was secure.

Yet, you bypassed all of it.

I guess you cracked me open so effortlessly, with a quiet tenderness I wasn’t prepared for, or maybe, when the layers of intellect are stripped away, I am just a girl by the end of the day, longing for the very vulnerability I always claimed to fear.

It hurts to admit how deeply you shook me, how easily you made me want to drop my guard and just let go.

For years, I withheld myself, keeping watch from the high tower of my own mind, waiting for something entirely real.

I wanted a love so undeniable that if I didn’t take the risk, I would live to bitterly regret it. I wanted someone I could love fondly and unconditionally; someone whose presence would be so certain that it wouldn’t let me hesitate for even a single second before saying yes.

But then, somehow, fate made our paths cross again.

You suddenly awakened something in me that I thought was dead, buried somewhere deep and dark beneath layers of professional armor and analytical distance.

Everything was my first with you.

The quiet warmth of a shared glance, the sudden ache of missing someone, the terrifying beauty of being perceived—it all belonged to you.

The emotions I have felt—and keep on feeling right now, even as I type these words with a heavy heart—are extraordinary. I am overwhelmed by them in an astonishing, terrifying way.

They have a weight that my mind cannot smoothly catalog or explain away; they just sit in the center of me, heavy, raw, and bleeding through the lines of everything I do.

I see the way you look at me when you think I am not analyzing the room. I read your body language, the sudden, soft shift in how you carry yourself when I walk into a space, how acutely focused you have become on me and on the micro-details I never realized anyone else could notice.

We shook hands on a pact; we explicitly told each other we were just friends, trying to protect ourselves from our own depth.

But my eyes are trained to see the unsaid, and all I can see now is how quickly and deeply you are falling for me.

And on my side of the glass, watching you lean in, I feel this desperate, aching pull. I cannot help but fall so much harder, and so much deeper, for you, too.

Letting you in this close is the most frightening thing I have ever done, because my feelings for you have completely outgrown my ability to control them.

Nevertheless, as much as my heart breaks with the desire for you to be my one and only, I cannot bring myself to say yes to you. I cannot say yes to us.

Because around you, despite the focus and the agonizing, unspoken tension, I am made to feel like an option.

You have been forever hesitant, standing at the threshold with one foot out the door, weighing variables and calculations that shouldn’t matter if the soul was true. It leaves a constant, quiet bruise on my spirit to see you doubt what we are.

Your love is conditional, bartered, and measured by the standards of a world that doesn’t understand devotion. Mine is not.

The kind of love I am willing to hand to my person is infinite, an entire ocean offered without a safety net, a total surrender.

In return, I do not ask for grand gestures; I only ask for the barest, most sacred essentials: to be fully seen, intensely desired, and, most importantly, fiercely and unapologetically chosen.

I do not see how I can ever give my infinity to a man who remains obsessed with the superficiality of other women—with all women, it seems, but me.

I cannot and won’t compete with a crowd, and my affection is too sacred to be placed on a shelf while your eyes wander. I will not audition for a role that should inherently belong to me.

To admire everyone else is to leave me invisible in the one place I wanted to be found. It reduces this rare, extraordinary thing we share into just another piece of background noise in your life, and it breaks my heart to realize that my depth is being met with a wandering gaze.

To put it shortly, and with a grief that tears at my chest: I cannot be with you.

Because if I yield, if I step down from the podium and let myself be soft in your arms, it will break me into infinite, unrecoverable pieces. If I let you ruin me with half-hearted promises, I know I will never truly recover from the loss of you.

I love you deeply, R.S.

It is an agonizing, beautiful truth I carry in the dark, a phantom ache that accompanies every breath.

But the ultimate, sorrowful paradox of my survival remains unbroken: I love myself even more.

I love my sovereignty too much to watch it be slowly diluted by your hesitation, even if holding onto myself means letting go of the only person I have ever truly wanted.

So maybe in another life, where the sight is clearer and the world is less distracted, I will be entirely yours.

But in this life, I am keeping the gates closed until the right person cracks my code.

I will only surrender myself to a man who will choose me from day one—and most importantly, a man who will only ever have eyes for me.

Goodbye, my first love; thank you for proving to me that I can feel, even if it had to hurt this much to know it.