When You Chose Him

Dear You,

I have held these words inside me for years, carrying them quietly as if by speaking them aloud I would somehow shatter the fragile equilibrium I’ve maintained since we drifted. I am writing now, not to send, not to demand answers, not even to ask for apologies—but to bear witness to the truth of how it felt to lose you.

Do you remember how close we were once? I can still feel it in my chest: the ease of our laughter, the way our conversations tumbled over one another, the way I could read your silences as easily as your words. That beauty, that rare intimacy between two people who understood each other in ways the world could not comprehend, was everything to me.

And yet, as we grew closer, something shifted. You always told me it was my gaze that changed, that I had grown distant. But I wonder, now, if it was not I who drifted, but you. Perhaps it was always in your eyes, the quiet turn toward someone else, the slow reordering of your affections until I could no longer find my place in your orbit.

Then he came. You chose him. And in the quiet way that love does, you built a space between us to make room for him—a space I could no longer fill. You told me, proudly or maybe defensively, that he made you feel complete in ways I could not. And for a time, I watched, carefully, silently, as he became your “better,” your chosen one, while I was left in the shadows of a friendship that once shone with its own light. How he became better than me, I still cannot comprehend, for the person he was then—and perhaps still is—could never match the depth of what we shared.

And yet, after a while, he changed his mind. He said he tore your heart in two. And I want to scream at him: tell me how he possibly could have, when you were hurting him just as deeply in the ways only you could. We are not simple creatures, are we? We break into pieces both seen and unseen. Hearts, I think, are less vessels than mirrors: they fracture in reflection of each other’s flaws, and sometimes, in the reflection, it feels as though someone else did the breaking.

I write this letter not to accuse, although my fingers ache to do so. I write it to remember the small things—your laugh spilling over a quiet room, your eyes catching sunlight in ways I wanted to memorize, the way your hand would graze mine in a casual gesture that felt sacred. Those memories are mine now, and they sting because they are unattainable, locked in a past I cannot revisit without pain.

I have asked myself endlessly what I could have done differently. Could I have held my attention more carefully? Could I have spoken when I should have stayed silent, or stayed silent when I should have spoken? Could I have loved you differently, or was this inevitable, the way some friendships are destined to fray when life introduces someone else into the pattern?

You left me for him, but I do not hate you. Not truly. There is a tenderness still, a fragile, quiet love for the person you were when our friendship was enough. I remember you without blame, though I remember the loss sharply, the hollow spaces where laughter once lived. I remember us, how the world could shrink down to the size of our shared jokes and secret observations, how nothing else mattered when we were together.

It hurts, yes, to think that our bond was replaceable. It hurts to imagine that the things we built in trust and laughter could be set aside, as if they were mere stepping stones in the pursuit of something else. And yet, I also see clearly now that love—platonic or romantic—is not always a fair game. It cannot always be measured, contained, or balanced. You followed your heart, I suppose, in the way we all must, and I will not condemn you for that. But I will mourn what we lost.

This letter will remain unsent. I will fold it and place it in a drawer where it will never reach you, where its words can serve only as my own exhalation of grief and remembrance. And yet, writing it has been its own quiet redemption, a way to honour what we had while acknowledging the truth of what is gone.

I hope he makes you happy. I hope your heart, in all its beautiful complexity, found peace. And I hope that, somewhere in the quiet spaces that remain between us, you remember me—not with guilt, not with longing, but with the soft reverence of someone who once mattered.

Always,

Me