[NF] How can you love something, you never had?
How can you love something you never had? It’s hard to explain, but the feelings are very real, very raw, and very heartbreaking.
I’ve been in love many times, but this one is different. It’s amusing that I’m so stuck on this person loving me back. He makes me feel safe and secure yet he feels so far away. I see him fading away in the distance. However, the memories are still there, the first time we met, the first hug, and the first kiss followed with the words “I love you Rose”. Only you called me “Rose”.
On the first day we met you asked me my name, I told you it’s Daniel Rose. Two first names that my mother carefully hand picked for me. I told you many just call me Daniel but you insisted on calling me Rose since you like it better. You said I was as beautiful as one. So breathtaking yet so dangerous as roses have thorns. The thorns are used as protection to keep danger away, and I guess I had thorns myself. Things I was ashamed of, I didn’t share them with you as I wanted to keep you close. I didn’t want you running away yet in doing so I made it worse.
You lost feelings and suddenly the words “I love you” meant nothing. Just words you used to sprinkle around here and there. As I looked at you in the eye, I knew it was going to be the last time I would ever see you. I paused that moment like a picture. I forced myself to remember your face: your black wavy hair, your mustache & goatee combo, the plump on your soft heart shaped lips, and my most favorite feature of all, your eyes. Brown eyes, like those of falling dry crushed leaves. Your eyes were the thing you were most insecure about but there were my favorite thing about you. Long lashes, doe eyes, and a white birthmark in the center of your iris. I saw your future in them, but in that moment I saw that your future didn’t include me. I asked you for one last kiss, as you leaned to kiss me I embraced myself for what will be the last time I will ever kiss your lips, the last time I will feel safety in your arms, and properly the last time I will ever be in love.
Before I knew it you were gone. I wished you would have kissed me for longer. I dropped to my knees and cried as you left hoping you would turn back, pick me up, and kiss me saying you could never live without me but it never happened. Everything having to do with the color red or flowers reminded me of you, especially roses, ever since that day I hated roses. Roses bloom during the summer but die out during the winter and at that very moment I was dead. I couldn’t imagine my life without him. However roses are year round, they begin to bloom back but die out once again, and this becomes a cycle. A cycle that I’m currently suck in, a death spiral. Whenever I meet a guy I fall in love just for him to not love me back, I become broken, then I find comfort in things and build myself back together only to be broken back down in seconds. I feel myself getting weaker each time the cycle repeats.
I ask myself, why even try? How can you love something you never had?
You can’t.
It’s heartbreaking because you aren't actually missing a real person or a tangible past; you are grieving a ghost, a beautiful future that your own mind fabricated but reality never allowed to exist.
Or…. can you?
You can love what you never had because your heart doesn't care about timelines; it feels the aching weight of that missing piece as a living, breathing reality.
What do you think? Can you love something you never had?
Wrote this at 4:32am on May 21, 2026. Hope you guys enjoy it!