I Saw You, Loved You in Silence

I saw you for the first time on a gray morning, when the world felt distant and heavy. You stood under a tree, the rain touching your hair softly, like it knew it had found something beautiful. You were laughing—at what, I never knew. But that sound, that small burst of joy, found its way into the quietest corners of me.

And just like that, I began to love you.

Not loudly. Not with grand gestures or borrowed words. I loved you in silence, like the moon loves the ocean—distant, yet always pulling. I memorized the way you blinked when confused, the way your shoulders rose when you tried not to cry. I saw everything, even the things you thought no one noticed.

You were never mine, and I never tried to make you be. I told myself that loving you from afar was enough—that being near you, even in shadows, was more than I had ever asked for.

You walked beside others. You smiled at them the way I had imagined you’d smile at me. And I never hated them. How could I? They got to live in the light of someone I only dared to love in silence. And so, I watched. And I stayed quiet.

There were moments when our eyes met and lingered for just a second too long. Moments when your smile felt like it held a question. But I always looked away. I was afraid—afraid that if I spoke, I would ruin the purity of what I felt. That my love, once spoken, would become real, and being real meant it could break.

I imagined the words so many times. I practiced them in my mind, whispered them in the dark. “I love you.” Just three words. So simple, yet so impossible. Because once said, they would demand answers, expectations, decisions. And I wasn’t brave enough to risk losing even your shadow.

Instead, I wrote you into poems I never shared. I carved your initials into notebooks I never let anyone read. I drew you as a silhouette on the edge of every story I told myself. I created a thousand versions of our story—ones where you loved me back, where we were happy, where my silence turned into symphonies.

But those stories always ended at the same place: with me, watching you, and you, not knowing.

Time passed. The seasons changed, but my love remained. Some days it was soft and sweet, like sunlight through a window. Other days it ached like a secret too heavy to carry. I thought I would feel that way forever.

But I don’t know when I started letting go.

Maybe it was the day I saw you happy, truly happy, with someone who made your eyes glow in a way I had only dreamed of. Or maybe it was the day I realized that love is not always about being chosen—it’s about choosing, every day, to wish the best for someone, even if you’re not part of that best.

Letting go wasn’t a decision. It was a slow, soft unraveling. It was walking the same streets without looking for your face. It was hearing your name and not flinching. It was no longer needing to write poems to hold the feeling.

But don’t think I regret it.

Loving you in silence taught me more than any confession ever could. It taught me patience, tenderness, and strength. It taught me that some feelings are meant to shape us, not define our endings.

And though we will never be a story written in the stars, we were something—I was something—because I loved.

And that… is enough.