A Woman in Love (And the Distance Between Us)

Life is a moment in space. I never understood that lyric until the day you left.

Not in a dramatic, suitcase-in-hand kind of way. You didn’t slam doors or shatter plates. You just… slowly faded from the edges of my life like breath on a mirror. One day, I turned around, and the person I loved most was a stranger in the same room.

And yet, I loved you still.

I kissed the morning goodbye the day you moved across the world for work. We said it was temporary. We said love could survive anything. You promised to call. I promised to wait. But somewhere between the time zones and the long silences, I started talking to the empty side of the bed more than I talked to you.

Still, I defended our love like it was a religion. Like it was my identity. Because I was a woman in love, and that meant something once.

It was that kind of love that made me dance barefoot in our kitchen at 2 a.m. while you laughed and held the camera, saying I looked like a goddess with bed hair and no makeup. It was the kind of love that made me cancel job interviews just to spend one more afternoon tangled in bedsheets and promises. It was real. I’d bet my soul on it.

When you left, the road became narrow and long. My days started to blur together—work, home, sleep, repeat—while your name hovered on my lips like a song I was too tired to sing. I’d catch glimpses of couples holding hands in the rain and feel that quiet ache in my chest. Not envy—just a longing for something that once fit perfectly in the palms of my hands.

We planned it all at the start. A life. A home. Maybe children with your eyes and my stubbornness. You said, “Forever,” like it was a guarantee. But love, I’ve learned, doesn’t come with warranties. It comes with risks. It comes with choices.

And I chose you. Again and again, even when you didn’t choose me back.

We may be oceans away, but I still feel your love in the strangest places. In the scent of your cologne on an old scarf. In the songs that shuffle into my playlist like fate. In the dreams that leave me waking up reaching for a ghost.

No truth is ever a lie, you used to say. But here I am, choking on the truth that we’re not “us” anymore. And still, I stumble and fall—but I give you it all.

Because I am a woman in love. And I would do anything to bring you back into my world. To hold you again, just once, with the kind of embrace that says, I forgive you… and I miss who we were.

What do I do?

What does any woman do when love becomes a memory instead of a presence?

We survive. Quietly. Bravely. Pathetically, some days. But we survive.

I remember one night—months after your last text—I sat on our couch with a bottle of wine and cried through the same song on repeat: “I am a woman in love, and I’d do anything…” It was Barbra Streisand. Of course it was.

I whispered the lyrics like a prayer to a god I no longer believed in.

That night, I realized something: Love doesn’t have to end for us to let go. I could still love you. Fiercely. Secretly. But I didn’t have to live in the waiting room of your absence anymore.

And that’s what I did.

I got up. I wiped the mascara from my cheeks. I washed the wine glass and changed the sheets. I started rebuilding my life one breath at a time.

But I will never deny this truth: I was a woman in love. I defended you. I protected us. I gave all of me. And that love—it shaped me, shattered me, and taught me the quiet power of letting go without bitterness.

If you’re reading this, wherever you are, I hope you know I’m not angry.

I’m just… grateful.

Because loving you reminded me what my heart is capable of. And that’s something I will never regret. Not once. Not ever.

I am still a woman in love.

But now, I’m in love with myself first.