"Half a Heart Still Hopes"

I used to think love was a finish line—

A place where two people arrived, hand in hand,

Hearts full, wounds forgotten,

Like a story with a perfect ending.

But life has a crueler kindness,

And endings aren’t always the ones we dream of.

Some endings come quietly,

Like someone fading out of a photograph,

Piece by piece, until only the outline remains.

You were never mine in the way the stars are owned—

You were passing light,

And I mistook it for forever.

You left me in the middle of becoming.

In the halfway house of heartbreak,

Where things are not whole,

But not yet gone.

And I?

I was the sentence never finished,

The song cut off at the chorus,

The echo of laughter in a room long emptied.

But still—

Still, a part of me refused to close.

Refused to surrender to silence.

Because even after you walked away,

Even after your absence grew teeth and shadows,

Half a heart still hopes.

Hope is not a loud thing.

Not a firework or a sunrise.

Hope is a whisper under rubble,

A soft knock behind a sealed door.

Hope is the reason I check my phone

Even when I know your number won’t call.

Hope is cruel, yes,

But it’s also the only thing

That keeps a garden blooming

In the dead of winter.

I walk through the world like a poem no one finished.

The left side of me remembers you—

Your laugh, your touch,

The way you called my name

Like it was a prayer only you were allowed to say.

The right side of me?

It’s trying.

Learning to fill empty chairs

With new stories,

To hold hands without guilt,

To stop measuring every smile

Against the shape of yours.

I see couples in cafes,

And wonder how many of them are pretending.

I wonder how many are halfway like me—

Smiling, laughing,

But still carrying ghosts in their coat pockets.

I wonder if you're carrying mine.

People say time heals.

But time does not heal—

Time distracts.

Time teaches you to carry pain with grace.

To walk without limping in public.

To fold the ache into poetry,

Or bury it in polite conversations.

But when night comes…

Oh, when the night comes—

That’s when the ache unbuttons its coat

And climbs into bed beside you.

It knows you better than anyone now.

And yet—

Half a heart still hopes.

Hope doesn’t mean I want you back.

It means I want to be okay.

I want to wake up one day

And not think of you first.

I want to write a love poem

That doesn’t taste like blood.

There’s something sacred about what survives.

Not every flower dies in drought.

Some learn to live off moonlight,

Some drink from memories.

Some grow in places where no one thought life could bloom.

And so I tend to myself—

Water my roots with tears if I must,

Pull the weeds of regret,

Let the sun touch the parts of me

You never cared to know.

I am not whole yet.

But I’m healing in the shape of it.

There was a time

I hated you for leaving,

For carving your name

Into places I couldn’t scrub clean.

But now—

Now I see the gift

Hidden in the goodbye.

You gave me

Myself.

You gave me

The silence I needed to hear my own voice.

You gave me

A broken map

That led me back to my own door.

So here I stand—

A little cracked,

A little softer,

Still learning how to dance without stepping

On memories that sting.

But I dance.

And that is hope.

That is grace.

That is the beauty of surviving

With only half a heart

Still beating in rhythm

With the future.

They say love is all or nothing.

But they are wrong.

Because here I am,

With half a heart—

Not waiting,

Not wishing—

Just hoping.

Hoping for better days.

Hoping to fall in love again,

Even if it scares me.

Hoping to be seen—fully,

By someone who doesn't flinch

At the cracks in my soul.

This is not a happy ending.

It’s not even an ending.

It’s a beginning born from brokenness.

It’s a flame that survived the flood.

It’s me,

Alive,

Still breathing,

Still daring,

Still writing.

Because even now,

After all the hurt and the quiet and the leaving—

Half a heart still hopes.

And sometimes,

That’s more than enough.