He unrequitedly loved Anna; Anna unrequitedly loved Marco; Marco probably unrequitedly loved some rando none of them had ever met. The world was pitiless. Nobody had any power over anyone else.
I desperately wanted to say Please Don’t Waste Your Time on Me because I feared that I would somehow be the cause of his undoing if I allowed him to faun over me in the ways that his heart desired. He was, after all, Enlightened and I was a Caster. There was no possibility of his interest in me ever becoming anything more than a romantic fable...
One day, I will wake up with a terrible longing for you. And in some corner of the world, your heart will skip several beats at the thought of my name. And you’ll finally know what I meant when I said: When you stand near a burning pyre, the heat tends to rub off on you.
They either come back or they don’t. That’s what you tell yourself. That’s what you learn. As you go through mundane days with so much of pain beating in your chest that you feel it will explode. You strike days off your calendar, waiting, going for a run, picking up a new hobby, while trying to numb that part of your brain that refuses to forget the little details of your skin. Soon, you start sleeping in the middle of the bed, learn how to get through the evenings alone, go to cafes and cities alone, you learn how to cook enough dinner for yourself and just make do without the kisses on your neck. You learn…Adjust..Accept.. The tumor of pain already exploded one lonely night when you played his voice recording by mistake.. by mistake.. But you didn’t die.. Did you? They either come back.. or they don’t.. You survive..
Men like you happen once. Women like me prefer to live our lives cautiously with your after taste, lessons and splinters of broken heart underneath our tongues.