Silly Dream

I walked into the psychiatric ward feeling like something inside me had finally given way. I was tired in a way that sleep or silence could not fix. When my psychiatrist saw me, her expression changed instantly. There was this quiet sadness in her eyes, as if she already knew I was carrying more than I could hold.

She asked what happened. I told her I felt myself slipping again, that the memories of everything you put me through had started to rise up and drown me all over. Saying it out loud made my chest tighten, as if my heart was reliving every moment at once.

Then she asked, very softly, “Do you still have feelings for him?”

I looked down. My throat hurt. My heart hurt even more. I nodded and gave her a small smile I did not mean. It felt like admitting a truth I have been trying to run from. I still do not understand how I can love someone who broke me the way you did, someone who left me doubting my worth and questioning my place in the world.

Sometimes I think loving you is a burden I was never meant to carry. It feels like a punishment I never earned but somehow ended up serving anyway. It is strange how love can stay behind long after the person is gone, how it can cling to the ribs and weigh down every breath.

She asked me another question, one that felt like it reached straight into the part of me I keep buried. “What do you look for in a relationship with him?”

I couldn’t answer at first. I stared at my hands, at the floor, at anything that was not her eyes. And then, with a voice that barely felt like mine, I said, “I don’t want him back in my life anymore.”

The moment the words left my mouth, they hurt. They felt like glass in my throat. My chest tightened until it felt bruised from the inside. I think that was when the truth finally caught up with me. I had wanted it to be you for so long. I had held onto that hope like it was the only thing keeping me alive.

I wanted a life with you so badly that even imagining a future without you felt like a betrayal of my own heart. I cried at the thought of holding a child that wouldn’t have your smile, of standing beside someone who wasn’t you, of living in a house where your laugh would never echo.

But wanting you never mattered.
Because at the end of all that hope, you chose someone else.

And now I have to teach myself how to breathe in a world where I am no longer allowed to dream of you.

I am tired.
So tired in a way that scares me.
I do not know how much more of this I can hold together.