How did I feel?

How did I feel? 

Please ask me once more... 

I am not sure how I was supposed to feel. The lines between what we had and what was lost were so blurred—because how was I to feel? To pour out into love and for one to hand it away like it mattered nothing to them. 

How do people do this again? How do people hope? 

Love, to me, is hope, and at one end of hope, we have despair, recoiling the strings of fate. And if only I had accepted it, I would undo it. I would walk past them. I would have closed my eyes. I would have hidden away. Why can’t we just fall in love without thinking of the agony that it might end? 

Sorry... what I meant to say is, I don’t know how I felt. 

There was a part of me that felt relieved about being right—that it would eventually happen. And then there was something else, something I had never truly felt before. It was saddening, sickening, maddening. I thought I was losing my mind. I felt like my heart had been ripped open, and oh, fuck... how I wanted to die. 

If you ask me now, I think it’s better to be adored than to be the adorer. I think the adored holds so much power. And humans, right... who doesn’t like power? 

I know what you’re asking me, but I can’t answer. I can’t... 

Look, I would rewind time. I would go back to that moment when I knew and turned away. I would have told them something else—like maybe the food is getting cold—not to get sentimental and all that... 

Loving someone is torture, especially when you reserve that feeling for everyone else but yourself... How much more was I willing to lose just to be held? Held in those cold arms that would forget me in the light of day. 

I felt... I felt... a soul-crashing pain I didn’t think I would survive. I felt betrayed, hurt, deceived. I felt fooled... I felt crazy. That’s what it does to you. 

I felt like I wanted to hate... but love had poured so many gallons inside me—festering, burning, and refusing to turn into hate. I wanted it to be easy, from love to hate, but it was just from love to agony. And there was no hate... no hate. No hate in between, no hate down that road. I wanted to hate, but I felt... 

I felt love.