Some people don't enter your life loudly.
They come quietly like a message at night, like laughter that feels too easy, like comfort you didn't know you were missing.
That was how he came into mine.
I didn't plan to love him.
I didn't even think of love at first. It started as conversations that lasted too long, replies that came too fast, and the strange way my day felt incomplete if I hadn't heard from him.
He felt familiar.
Too familiar.
He knew when to make me laugh. He knew when to stay. He knew how to listen or at least, how to make me feel heard. And that was dangerous, because I had spent so long feeling invisible.
With him, I wasn't.
We shared small things first. Random thoughts. Silly jokes. Complaints about life. Then slowly, without warning, we shared deeper things fears we didn't say out loud to others, memories that still hurt, dreams we pretended didn't matter.
Somewhere between all that, I fell.
Not suddenly.
Not dramatically.
I fell quietly.
I fell in the way I waited for his name to light up my screen.
In the way my heart softened whenever he was kind.
In the way I defended him, even when he confused me.
He never said he was mine.
But he never acted like he wasn't.
That was the hardest part.
He stayed close enough to feel like home, but distant enough to remind me I didn't belong there. He gave me attention, affection, warmth — just not certainty.
And I told myself it was enough.
I told myself not to ask questions.
Not to expect too much.
Not to want more.
Because wanting more would mean admitting the truth.
That I loved someone who hadn't chosen me.
That I was holding onto moments while he held onto freedom.
That I was slowly becoming almost everything to him while he was already everything to me.
I didn't know then how this would end.
I didn't know how many times I would break my own heart just to keep him close.
I didn't know that love could exist without belonging.
All I knew was this:
He was there.
He felt right.
And I was already his
even though he was never mine.