u/DifficultyLife7

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i grew up walking through rows of ordinary blooms,

learning their names before i learned my own,

touching petals just to see which ones would fold shut

and which ones would stay open no matter how rough the season got.

i thought that was enough. i thought a garden

was something you walked through, not something

that walked into you.

there were other flowers, before.

smaller ones, paler ones,

flowers that grew in shade and never quite reached for the sun.

i held a few of them too, carefully,

the way you hold something you're not sure is yours to hold.

some browned at the edges before i even noticed.

some i planted in soil that was never going to hold anything,

and i kept watering anyway,

because i didn't yet know the difference

between tending and hoping.

i learned the names of things that don't last.

tulips that close at the first hint of cold.

daisies that scatter if you breathe on them wrong.

i learned to expect the wilting before the blooming,

to keep my hands loose around every stem,

to walk through gardens with my eyes half closed

so the losing wouldn't sting as much.

i thought i understood flowers by then.

i thought i had built calluses thick enough

that nothing growing could surprise me anymore.

i had seen enough gardens end in autumn

to stop expecting spring to mean anything.

i didn't know there was a pink i hadn't seen yet.

i didn't know some doors in a garden

stay closed your whole life

until the one afternoon they don't.

it was a sakura rose i held for a single afternoon,

its petals still burning behind my eyelids

months after it wilted.

i only knew it for a handful of hours

in a lifetime that stretches in all directions,

yet its thorn is still buried somewhere in my chest

and i have learned to breathe around it.

it was the kind of pink that doesn't exist in nature,

the kind painters chase and never catch.

when it unfurled in that room,

time forgot to move forward.

i didn't know a flower could see me,

could turn its whole face toward mine

and make the rest of the world blur into watercolor.

but the pink was too vivid to last.

some colors are meant to be remembered,

not kept.

the stem snapped before sunset,

and i've been holding the memory of its scent

in the hollow of my palms ever since,

cupping it like water that refuses to stay.

there are mornings i wake

and the first thing i feel is the absence of petals.

not a thought. not a name.

just the shape of something soft

that used to press against my ribs.

my hands still remember the weight of it.

five seconds stretched into a small forever,

and now a thousand forevers later

i am still standing in that room

watching pink turn to shadow.

i keep going back to the moment the stem snapped,

turning it over like a stone i can't put down,

looking for the crack that must have been there all along.

i never find it.

what i find instead is the way it leaned toward the light,

the way it opened like it meant to,

like nothing about it was pretending.

a flower doesn't turn its face

toward something it doesn't want.

so i still don't understand

why the closing looked so much like the opening,

why it felt so real right up until it wasn't there.

i don't think i've buried it. i think i've just

learned to walk around the plot of dirt

where i keep expecting it to grow back.

some part of me still checks that patch of soil

every season, out of habit,

the way you check a pocket for keys

you know you already lost.

i don't ask the garden to explain itself anymore.

i just never got the chance to understand

what changed between the unfurling and the fall,

what shifted somewhere out of sight,

what made a season so sure of itself

suddenly change its mind.

it was only a few hours.

a few hours against the whole sprawl of my days.

and yet here i am,

still writing letters to a garden that closed long ago,

still tending a stem that no longer exists,

still pressing dead petals between the pages of my chest

and wondering why they haven't turned to dust.

some wounds learn to sing.

some pink never stops bleeding.

some flowers only need a single afternoon

to ruin you for every garden that comes after.

There's a timer for stories and view once messages. but no timer for Instants??? makes no sense.

I find myself falling uncontrollably and intensely for anyone who shares interests with me like music tastes, series, movies, video games... to the point that I don't give an eye to things like values, personalities, insecurities, sex.... is this healthy?

Like come on, why don't I get honesty when I be honest. like tell me you're not interested instead of keeping it uncertain. "I value our friendship and I don't want to lose you" you just don't want to lose my attention cutie

i see them everywhere, people who spam stories, replying to every thread, posting just to feel seen. and i realize i do the same thing. we're all hungry for something we can't name, throwing pieces of ourselves into the void hoping someone throws back a heart. it's exhausting to be around because i recognize the desperation, and it reminds me of my own. i don't know how to stop needing the applause, how to just exist without performing. if you've broken out of this cycle, how did you do it. and should i cut off this type of people?

hey guys, i have a question. so i want to cut off my crush to move on, but i can't tell them to not hurt them. they appreciate me as a friend and we haven't explicitly confronted about it but they've been giving me smoking guns that they're not interested, and it's making me tired. should i leave them ambiguously?

i've been talking to someone for a while. we've had really deep conversations, long calls (like, six hours), a lot of mirroring and shared values. i have feelings for her, but i'm afraid she might not feel the same way. sometimes it feels like she's into me and sometimes it's not. she's said some things that feel like walls, and some that feel like doors. i'm trying not to overanalyze. and i've learnt by time that signs do not matter.

i've decided not to confess or push for clarity right now. i want to let things build naturally, and i'm also working on myself (job, mental health, healing from past rejection trauma). but the uncertainty is eating me alive. i keep checking if she's online, whether she liked my story, why she hasn't replied yet. i know this is my anxious attachment acting up. i've been burned before by mixed signals, so my brain constantly scans for rejection.

i don't want to cut her off. i don't want to demand answers. i want to learn how to be okay with not knowing, and how to keep my focus on my own life while still staying open to whatever this becomes.

for those who've been through this: how do you actually cope day-to-day? what do you tell yourself when the anxiety spikes? how do you stop the checking behaviors? are there any mental reframes that helped you build a more secure mindset while staying in the uncertainty?

i'm not looking for "just move on" or "she's not interested." i'm looking for how to manage my own mind while i wait and see.

I've been chasing love since I was 14. 7 years. Rejection after rejection. Silence. "Let's just be friends." Ghostings. Almosts that never became something real. Late 2023, I finally got into my first relationship. It ended by summer 2024. Then a situationship that dragged for 4 months and collapsed into nothing. By 2025, I had already stopped believing. I told myself love wasn't real. I was just a romantic fool in a generation that doesn't believe in romance anymore.

Then this happened.

Someone noticed me a full year before she ever spoke to me. She built a fake professional excuse just to reach out. She guessed my personality type without me saying a word. We liked the same music, the same albums, the same rare way of seeing the world. I thought maybe, finally, the universe had done something fair.

The first time we met in person, she shook. For hours. Because I was there. She kept searching for my eyes during her own presentation. Afterwards, she brings up about a private piano room we planned for before, just us. We sang together. She hugged me for five full seconds, twice, in silence. She started a sentence "True, you haven't known a good friend circle where people really understands you and share your depth, you met me now, while in fact I'm not a f—" and stopped herself mid-word. I told her she was the rarest person I'd ever met. She smiled. We made hand hearts from a distance. She told me "life is beautiful" when she saw I was drained. She told me "you deserve everything."

For three days, I was floating. I thought the 7 years of emptiness were finally over. I thought I had found something sacred.

Then came my graduation. She showed up late. Talked more to a male friend of mine than to me. Didn't hug me at departure. I crashed that night. Panic attack while blaming myself for not being happy for me and my parents, and just grieving about her. I even. No sleep for 40 hours. I wrote her an honest letter lately, not asking for a relationship, just clarity. I said I had feelings. I needed to know where I stood so I could breathe again.

She avoided it. She started to send light white hearts instead of always busting my DMs with red ones. Pretended she didn't know about the email. When she finally read it, her reply was:

"Thank you for your honesty. I don't feel a romantic connection on my side. This stays in the frame of friendship for me."

I haven't cried. It's been over a day. But something inside me didn't just break. It shifted permanently.

I realized she lived that day as a deep, rare friendship. I lived it as sacred romance. The exact same moments meant two completely different things. And I can't live like that again. I can't pour my entire soul into something that feels romantic to me, only to be told it was platonic all along. That's not a misunderstanding. That's a wound that nearly killed me.

*But it's more than her. It's this whole generation. Romance isn't sacred anymore. People want intensity without commitment. They want the eye contact and the long hugs and the almost-confessions, but they don't want to call it love. They want deep connection without the weight of responsibility. They want to live the moment and then go back to being just friends. I can't do that. I don't even understand it.*

And I'm tired of being the only one who still believes love is supposed to mean something.

So I'm done. Not out of anger. Not to punish anyone. I'm just closing the door. I'm no longer looking for love. I'm no longer hoping for it. I'm not going to spend the rest years of my life bleeding out for a generation that treats romance like a hobby. If love exists for me, it will have to find me on its own terms. But I'm not searching anymore. I'm not waiting. I'm not scanning eyes in a room wondering if this one is different.

Because I gave everything to this one. And it still wasn't enough to be chosen. And I refuse to die on that hill twice.

Some people aren't meant for love. Maybe I'm one of them. And for the first time in my life, I'm not sad about that. I'm relieved. Because the hope was killing me. The silence between messages. The waiting. The analyzing. The wondering if I was finally worthy. I'm done wondering.

I'm 21. And I'm closing the chapter of love. Not because I hate it. Because I finally respect myself enough to stop chasing it.