Ten Years of Deep Love, Yet We Became Strangers

I spent the best ten years of my life loving someone, wagering everything on a family, giving birth to two children, wearing down my health, sinking into depression, and ending up with nothing, all alone.

Looking back, it didn't all collapse in an instant. Countless moments of giving in, countless concessions, and countless attempts to reassure myself gradually drained away my love, my hopes, and my youth.

On countless silent, still nights, I sat alone in a dark room, letting every scene from the past ten years play back slowly in my mind, frame by frame, as clearly as if it had all happened yesterday. The little moments of exquisite tenderness, the endless grievances that suffocated me, the countless days and nights I endured on my own, the heartache no one understood, the long years of being drained, betrayed, belittled, and crushed, the heart-rending separations and despair: all of it piled layer upon layer in my heart, becoming the deepest, heaviest, and most unforgettable marks of my life.

I have gone over it again and again so many times. What if, that summer when I was in my early twenties, I hadn't opened that conversation where we first met? What if I hadn't so easily fallen for that brief touch of tenderness just because no one had ever truly loved me? What if I hadn't ignored everyone's advice, the unknown risks ahead, and gone alone to a completely unfamiliar small city? What if I hadn't put my youth, my love, my future, and the stability of my whole life on the line to chase what I thought was true love? Would my life have been completely different?

Would I still be the clean, pure person I was then, with light in my eyes and hope for life, without having to suffer the hardships of this world, experience the coldness of human nature, or endure it all alone...