He first met me when I was an innocent girl.
I didn’t know the first thing about how to hold someone’s hand and send sparks through our veins. I didn’t know that the palpitations in my chest were not a medical complication. I didn’t know how to look through someone’s eyes and see the words they desperately want to say. I didn’t know how to kiss someone’s lips like it was sharing the last oxygen on earth. I didn’t know that the words ‘I love you’ meant ‘you don’t have to say it back but please do because I can’t hold my breath any longer’.
And then I became a siren.
I knew how to make him sigh by just a look through my half-closed eyes. I knew how to make him laugh through my candid whims and by the crinkle of my nose. I knew how to arouse him from the thoughts I never told anyone but him during the dead of night. I knew how to make him cry by my own tears that fell on his bare chest close to mine. I knew how to break his heart into tiny pieces by just one single goodbye.
But then I turned into a lone wolf.
I didn’t know how to be with someone who I never got to feel. I didn’t know how to read that the silence was an invisible string that was supposed to pull us together. I didn’t know that smoke could still mean a small ember that can start a wildfire if you cultivated it. I didn’t know that love was supposed to be ugly because it meant it was real.
And now I am me… whatever that may be.
I have become so many things, shed so many skins. So now I ask myself and perhaps you too, my reader: am I still the person he loved back when I was an innocent girl? Did he love me every time I turned? Does he still see the person he did when he thought to himself, “This is the girl I want to love”?
The truth is when you love someone when you are you, you slowly change. Whether you gain fangs or grow wings, for better or for worse you are not who you once were. And all is fair in love and war, they change too.
And then there comes a time to decide whether you embrace the change or not. You accept how they become someone new but it is either because you love them regardless or seemingly remind yourself that somewhere inside them is the one you found all those times ago. To this I wonder what if it is not there anymore?
Choose whatever you want, but know this:
You can never go back.
Airah Writes 