For a moment there, I thought I was falling.

I thought you felt it too—in those in-between moments when we’d sit together on the couch and you’d pass me my morning coffee. At sunset, when we’d walk to the shops and talk about everything and nothing and I’d stop to take a photo of the sky, but not post it anywhere because I just wanted to remember the moment.

But the honeymoon phase isn’t love. It is a kind of falling, yes. It is a falling in love with possibility. A falling in love with what we could be—what we could have been had we been the right ones for each other.

And so, for a moment there, I really did think I was falling.

But love is deeper than a lingering look after a goodnight kiss. Love is deeper than smiling in the morning after you receive a “good morning” text.

Love is what happens after the initial spark. Love is what happens when you peel back the layers and you see the nakedness underneath the armour.

Love is not easy. Love is effort. Love is choice. Love is growing together; challenging each other to become all the things you’re both capable of being.

I wanted it to be love. I think part of me still wonders if it could be. If we gave it another go, where could that path lead us? But instead, I’m done romanticizing. Whatever it was that I was trying to search for in you has to be found in me.

I masked whatever issues there were because I was in love with the idea of what we could be.

Still lost in the hope that something in someone else will bring out something that is missing in me.

If it had been love, maybe I wouldn’t have become so needy. If it had been love, maybe you wouldn’t have left when things got heavy. If it had been love, maybe I wouldn’t have tried to cling on so desperately to a relationship that clearly wasn’t working.

It doesn’t need to always be love, but I need to stop trying to find love in every person and thing outside of me.

It wasn’t love, but every relationship comes to teach us something.

And I sit here now with these memories, these moments going round and round in my head, like pieces in a puzzle—a mosaic of my life—that I know one day will come together quite beautifully.

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