UNREQUITED LOVE

 The term is new yet very familiar, I was today years old when I looked it up, unrequited love is just another fancy word for one-sided love. What is love?  a question that is simple but not so easy to answer. The ancient Greek Philosophers identified types of love; platonic(philia), romantic (Eros), self-love, and divine or unconditional love.

I remember sitting across from this girl that I liked, she had brown braids and beads on them, she had a t-shirt and a flannel on, it wasn't love at first sight but i noticed her, out of all the new faces in my new class in campus I noticed her, that was three years ago and i was just 18 years old fresh from high school,  Love at first sight? no!! but as time went by and we got to know each other, the feelings started growing and they came along with butterflies, fake scenarios, and excitement. I had never been lucky when it came to love as long as i could remember but this time i thought maybe just maybe the stars had aligned in my favor for once, we became very good friends and i made sure i got super close to her so that i would have a chance and despite her having a partner i still had hopes or maybe was i just feeding my delusions? That's for you to decide. Was i selfish for being supper happy when they had issues with the partner or we're in their rocky phase? I thought she was the love of my life. Maybe i thought wrong, was it just a crush? a crush that lasted three years or was it limerence. The years went by and we got even closer, my feelings grew stronger but she didn't feel the same way, i never gave up. I tried telling her how i felt very many times but my mouth would just betray me every single time by going mute, i also had the fear of being rejected, ruining our friendship and it would kill the comfort we had around each other, i wasn't a risk taker so the easiest way i could give her the message was through actions. I did everything i could but she interpreted it differently, she thought i was just a super nice friend. The consequence of not telling her that i have to live with now is the question what if i just told her. I wasn't sure sometimes of how she felt about me because, she'd make me happy, make me smile, make me mushy and i would die inside from all excitement, friends don't make you mushy, i got mixed signals. The question everyone would ask here if this was a movie or a novel would be, why wouldn't the necessary person just play their part? I asked myself the same question for the longest time and at some point you have to give yourself a reality check.

It took me a long time to realize, that no matter what i did she would forever see me as a kind-hearted friend, life doesn't always give you what you want, i had to come to terms with that, for me it was the romantic kind of love Eros but for her, it was purely platonic. Saturday 10, Aug, 2024 reality dawned on me, had to make a decision to let go for good this time, i raised my white flag. The hardest part of all this is, you cant just stop loving someone because they don't love you back, and as Denyse said, I might have been a drop to your ocean, but to me you were the entire ocean.

feel free to leave a comment or two.