Girl Kaleidoscope

Tag: First love

  • The Silence that Breaks Us

    Trauma does not always look like open wounds and trembling hands. Sometimes, it looks like silence. Like paralysis. Like the slow erosion of a future you can no longer picture, because each time you reached for certainty, the ground crumbled beneath you.

    It took me years to understand this. Years to realize that what I saw as rejection—what I felt as unbearable, heart-wrenching neglect—was something else entirely. He wasn’t ignoring me. He wasn’t being careless with my heart. He was afraid.

    At the time, I did not know the language of trauma. I did not know how it steals your voice, how it traps you in the present with no roadmap for what comes next. I did not know that some people, when faced with the unbearable weight of decision, simply freeze. I only knew what it felt like to pour out my soul in ink and receive nothing in return. To open my heart in trembling conversations, only to meet silence on the other side.

    Silence became the slow undoing of me. Not because I needed constant reassurance, but because I needed something—anything—to hold on to. A plan, a promise, a direction. But trauma makes the future feel like a distant and unreachable thing, and now I see how that weight crushed him, too.

    I wish I had understood then. I wish I had not seen his fear as something done to me, but rather as something he was drowning in. I wish I had not let my own pain turn to bitterness, had not lashed out in my agony, desperate for him to just say something, anything at all. But I was young, and I was hurting, and I did not yet know what I know now—that sometimes, the people we love are not holding back because they do not care, but because they do not know how to move forward.

    It reminds me of Shakespeare’s words: “Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak whispers the o’erfraught heart and bids it break.” And that was the tragedy, wasn’t it? Neither of us could find the right words. My grief was too loud, his was too silent, and in the space between, something precious unraveled.

    In the end, it was the silence that broke me. Because distance does not allow for the unspoken to be read in a glance, for a hand on the shoulder to bridge the void where words fail. And so, I sat on one side of the ocean, waiting for answers, while he sat on the other, frozen in place, unable to give them.

    I have learned so much since then. I have learned how trauma takes hostages. How it steals not only the past but the future, making even love feel like something too uncertain to reach for. And most of all, I have learned that I, too, have been guilty of adding to another’s pain when I did not understand its depths.

    I cannot rewrite the past. I cannot go back and tell my younger self to hold her anger, to see beyond her own wounds, to recognize the shape of his fear. But I can hold space for the knowing now. I can offer the grace I once did not. And perhaps, that is its own kind of redemption.

  • The Love That Ruined Me

    They say you never forget your first love.

    I wish they were wrong.

    It would be easier to move through the world untouched by the memory of you, unmarked by the love we shared, free of the knowing. But I am not free. I am wrecked, ruined, rewritten by a love so deep, so consuming, that it still burns beneath my skin, long after you have gone.

    You were my soulmate. And I was yours.

    I don’t say that lightly. I don’t say that in wistful nostalgia, looking back through rose-colored glass. I say it with the weight of every whispered moment, every stolen glance, every aching hour spent waiting for the moment we could be alone. The way our souls moved in rhythm, finding each other across crowded rooms, through the cacophony of obligations and expectations.

    I gave you everything. And for so long, I believed you would give me everything in return.

    I waited. I hoped. I prayed.

    I stood at the edge of our love with my hands outstretched, waiting for you to take them, to pull me into forever. To say, You are mine, and I am yours, and I will choose you, no matter what it takes.

    But you never did.

    Instead, we lived in the liminal space between what we were and what we were allowed to be. Sneaking kisses under the moon when no one was watching. Walking just a little too far ahead of the others on group trips, letting our fingers brush, our hearts race. Speaking in code, in glances, in the language of longing that only we understood.

    You met my family. I met yours. We fit. Perfectly. Seamlessly.

    And yet, we were never allowed to fit.

    There were always eyes. Always whispers. Always the unspoken but ever-present expectations—never be seen alone, never step outside the bounds, never tarnish the name of the mission, never bring shame. They said it was about honor, about wisdom, about protecting reputations. But it felt like chains.

    If we had been anywhere else in the world, we would have dated like normal people. We would have sat across from each other in coffee shops, taken long drives with no destination, spent lazy afternoons wrapped in each other’s arms without guilt.

    And maybe, in that world, you would have chosen me.

    But we weren’t in that world.

    We were in this one.

    And in this world, you couldn’t make the same sacrifices for me that I made for you.

    I have tried to tell myself that I understand. That it wasn’t personal. That it wasn’t because I wasn’t enough, or because you didn’t love me with the same ferocity that I loved you. But deep down, I don’t believe that.

    Because I know what I gave. I know what I lost. I know how many times I reached across the void, sent my signals into the night, hoping you would see them, hoping you would answer.

    You never did.

    And now, I watch you live the life that should have been ours. With her.

    I tell myself not to look. Not to check. Not to see.

    But how do you not look at the wreckage of your soul?

    How do you not feel the ripples of a love so deep that even now, even after everything, a part of you is still waiting for him to reach back?

    Even just for friendship.

    Even though you know, deep down, that would never be enough.

    Because it was never meant to end this way.

    You were my first love. I was yours. And you don’t ever forget your first.

    I have tried to untangle myself from the clutches of this grief. I have tried to bury it, to smother it, to tell myself that I have moved on.

    But my body remembers.It remembers the way your hands traced the curve of my back, the way your breath warmed my skin on quiet nights beneath the stars. It remembers the safety of your arms, the rhythm of your heartbeat against mine, the way you whispered my name like it was a prayer.

    And so it betrays me.

    With every full moon, I am back in your embrace, bathed in silver light, swaying to the music of the night.

    With every wave that glistens under the sun, I remember the way your eyes caught the light, the way your laughter rippled through the air, bright and golden.

    With every rainfall, I am transported to the nights we stood together, soaked and laughing, the world around us fading as we clung to each other.

    Even as I long to forget, my body refuses.

    It keeps you alive in the scent of damp earth, in the brush of wind against my cheek, in the bloom of every flower that dares to exist in a world without you.

    And so I grieve.

    Not just for what was, but for what will always be—the love that ruined me, the love that still lingers, the love that even now, I am not sure I want to let go.