Love, Lies, and Her Silence

She walked into my life on a rainy Wednesday, the kind of day where clouds seem to hang low, as if listening to your thoughts. She wasn’t dressed in red or gold like the heroines in books. No, she wore blue—soft and distant, like the sea before a storm. I didn’t fall for her all at once. I didn’t even know I was falling.

But that’s the thing about love. Sometimes, it doesn’t roar into your life like a hurricane. Sometimes, it seeps in like fog—gentle, unnoticed, until it wraps around you completely.

Her name was Zoya. A name that sounded like poetry, like something half-whispered in dreams. She had eyes that seemed to hold back oceans, and a voice like broken glass wrapped in silk. Beautiful, but sharp—dangerous, if you listened too closely.

She never told me everything. But I didn’t mind at first. I filled the blanks with my own hopes, my own versions of her. That’s how love begins sometimes—not with truth, but with imagination.

She said she loved art, but she never painted. Said she liked books, but never finished one. She said she hated lies, yet her truths were always half-told. Still, I stayed. I believed what I wanted to believe. And in that way, I loved her.

We spent days wrapped in laughter and late-night walks. She would tell me small stories about her past, leaving out names, changing endings. I never asked why. I thought love was trust—and trust meant not asking too many questions.

She had a habit of going silent. Not the kind of silence that meant peace. It was the kind that shouted without making a sound. I’d wake up and find unread messages piling up. I'd call and hear her voice mail. Then days later, she’d return—smiling, as if nothing had happened.

“I just needed space,” she’d say, brushing her hair back, avoiding my eyes.

Space became her excuse. Silence became her language.

And still—I loved her.

But the truth has its own way of showing up. It creeps in through the cracks, drips like water from a broken ceiling. One night, her phone lit up while she was asleep on my couch. The name on the screen wasn’t mine. And the message? “Do you miss me tonight too?”

I didn’t scream. I didn’t cry. I just stared at her sleeping face, wondering who she really was. Wondering if the woman I had loved ever truly existed—or if she was just a mask carefully stitched from silence and sweet lies.

The next morning, I asked her. Calmly. Honestly.

“Is there someone else?”

She looked at me with those same ocean eyes. But this time, they didn’t hold back waves. They held walls.

“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” she said. “I didn’t plan this. I just… I don’t know how to love right.”

And then she left. No explanations. No goodbyes.

Just silence.

________________________________________

The days that followed felt like walking through a fog with no end. People asked about her. I said we drifted apart. What could I say? That I loved someone who wasn’t mine to love entirely? That I built a future on a foundation of soft lies and her absence?

No one tells you how painful it is to grieve someone who’s still alive.

I thought anger would help. But anger fades. Then you’re left with memories—memories that aren’t even real anymore, because you question every one of them. Was she ever truly there? Was that smile for me, or for the other life she kept hidden?

Love is a strange thing. It makes you want to believe. Even after the fall. Even after the truth. It wants to forgive, to understand, to find some logic in the pain.

But sometimes there is none.

Sometimes, people are just broken in ways you cannot fix. Sometimes, their silence hides more than pain—it hides patterns, histories, truths you’ll never be able to decode. And sometimes, your love isn’t enough—not because it lacked depth, but because it was given to someone who never learned how to receive it.

I tried to write about her. To make sense of it all. But the words never came out right. She was always more silence than story. More shadow than substance.

But if you ask me today, do I regret loving her? The answer is no.

Because even in the ruin she left behind, I found pieces of myself I didn’t know existed. I found strength in the heartbreak. I found my voice in her silence.

Love, lies, and her silence—those were her gifts to me.

I carry them quietly.

But I no longer let them define me.