Quiet Strength, Unrequited Love

I loved her the way the ocean loves the moon—faithfully, from a distance.

Her name was Mira, and she moved through the world like dusk: soft, unbothered, and unaware of the stars she made out of ordinary people. I met her on a Tuesday that smelled of rain. She wore yellow that day, the kind that wasn’t loud but hummed quietly under the weight of gray skies.

We became friends in the softest way—over books borrowed and returned, tea shared on cold afternoons, and the kind of laughter that needs no punchline. She told me stories with eyes that looked beyond me, as if her soul was always watching a memory she hadn’t quite let go of.

I never told her I loved her. I think she knew, though. You can only look at someone with that much reverence for so long before it becomes a confession. But Mira was never one to hurt people, not even by accident. She had a way of changing the subject with grace—like brushing aside a spider’s web without breaking it.

There were men she loved, none of them me. I watched her fall in love the way poets describe falling stars—suddenly, irreversibly, tragically. And each time, I stood nearby like a lighthouse watching ships sail past, never quite sure if they ever noticed the light meant for them.

There’s something lonely about loving someone who confides in you about everyone but you.

One night, she cried on my shoulder. Her heart had broken again, and I held her like she’d never been broken before, even though she had. She trembled in my arms, not knowing they ached to hold her even when she wasn’t crying. That night, she said I was the kindest person she’d ever met. I smiled through the wound her words left behind.

Kind. Always kind. Never beloved.

Time passed, as it does, cruel and indifferent. She traveled, she painted her hair red once, she wrote poems and left them in my books. I kept every single one. I never told her they made me cry.

One summer afternoon, we sat by the lake. The sky was a pale blue, stretched thin like an old bedsheet. She rested her head on my shoulder and said, “I wish I could find someone who made me feel safe. Like I could just breathe.”

I didn’t say a word. I didn’t tell her she already had.

But that’s the thing about unrequited love—it’s a quiet strength. It doesn’t ask. It doesn’t demand. It simply is. Like gravity. Like sunrise.

I watched her get married two years later.

She asked me to read a poem at her wedding. I wrote one that didn’t mention her name but spoke only of her. People clapped. She smiled. I don’t think she ever realized.

I danced with her that night. Just once. Her fingers were cold, her laugh familiar. She looked beautiful in a way that hurt to witness. I held her like a memory trying not to fade. We said goodnight with hugs that lasted just long enough to remember, not long enough to hope.

I moved away after that. She wrote sometimes. I always replied. Our friendship remained, steady and warm like a lamp left on for someone who’s always running late.

Now and then, I still dream of her.

In the dreams, she looks at me the way I looked at her all those years. In those dreams, she finally says my name like a secret she’s ready to keep.

But when I wake, the room is quiet. And so is the love.

I never stopped loving her. I don’t think I ever will. But I learned something vital in those years of quiet adoration:

Love does not always ask for reciprocation. Sometimes, it lives in the softest spaces of the soul—unspoken, unclaimed, and undefeated.

And that, too, is a kind of victory.