The Weight of Trying

The air was heavy in the apartment, even though the windows were open, letting in the soft evening breeze. She sat on the edge of the couch, her hands clasped tightly in her lap. Across the room, he stood by the window, staring out into the city lights, his reflection a ghost against the glass. Neither spoke, but the silence wasn’t empty—it was loaded with all the words they were too afraid to say.

Finally, she broke it. “Do you ever feel like this is too hard?”

He turned to her, startled by the question. “What do you mean?”

She hesitated, unsure of how to put the storm in her chest into words. “I mean us. This... relationship. It feels like we’re constantly working to keep it alive. And I’m not sure if love is supposed to feel like this.”

His brows furrowed, and he took a step closer, his voice low but steady. “Every relationship takes work. That’s normal.”

She looked up at him, her eyes brimming with unshed tears. “But love isn’t supposed to be work, is it? Love is supposed to be... easy. Natural. You shouldn’t have to try to feel it.”

He sighed and ran a hand through his hair, a habit she had once found endearing but now only reminded her of the distance growing between them. “So what are you saying? That you don’t love me anymore?”

Her heart clenched at the hurt in his voice. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I think I do. But I also think I’ve been trying so hard to convince myself that I still do, that I don’t even know what’s real anymore.”

He sat down across from her, his shoulders slumping. “So what do we do? Do we just give up?”

She shook her head, tears finally spilling down her cheeks. “That’s the thing—I don’t want to give up. But I also don’t want to keep forcing something that isn’t there.”

They sat in silence again, the weight of her words settling between them like an immovable object. She thought about all the nights they had spent arguing, the countless moments when their love felt more like a burden than a blessing. She thought about the times she had questioned if she was still in love or just in the habit of loving him.

“I used to think love was enough,” she said quietly. “That if you loved someone, everything else would just fall into place. But now I’m starting to wonder if love without ease is really love at all.”

He looked at her, his eyes filled with a mixture of confusion and pain. “So what are you saying? That we’re over?”

She took a deep breath, trying to steady her trembling voice. “I’m saying that maybe love isn’t the problem. Maybe the problem is us—how we’ve turned something beautiful into something that feels like work. I don’t want to wake up every day feeling like I have to try to love you. I just want to love you, freely and without effort. But I don’t know if we can get back to that.”

He was silent for a long time, his gaze fixed on the floor. Finally, he spoke, his voice barely above a whisper. “I thought love was about fighting for each other. About not giving up when things get hard.”

She nodded, her tears falling faster now. “It is. But there’s a difference between fighting for love and forcing it. And I don’t want us to get to a place where we’re forcing it just to say we didn’t give up.”

He reached out and took her hand, his touch warm but tentative. “So what do we do now?”

She looked at him, her heart aching with the weight of the decision she knew they had to make. “Maybe we take a step back. Give ourselves some space to figure out if this is what we really want. If this is still love or if it’s just the fear of losing what we’ve built.”

His grip on her hand tightened, and she could see the struggle in his eyes. “I don’t want to lose you.”

“And I don’t want to lose you either,” she said, her voice breaking. “But I think we’ve already started losing each other, and neither of us wants to admit it.”

The room grew quiet again, the only sound the faint hum of the city outside. They sat there, holding hands, caught between holding on and letting go.

Love had brought them together, but it wasn’t enough to keep them from drifting apart. And as much as it hurt to acknowledge, they both knew that sometimes, the hardest thing you can do for someone you love is to let them go.