She once told me, half-laughing, that I loved her too much. Maybe she was right. Maybe there’s such a thing as too much, though I never believed love worked in measurements. For me, it was simple: she existed, and so I loved her. I wrote her poems. Bad ones, mostly, but they carried pieces of me that words couldn’t otherwise hold. I remember how her hair would fall over her face in the mornings, unwashed, smelling faintly of sleep and rain. She’d complain about it, but to me it was perfect—proof that she didn’t have to try to be beautiful. She already was. I brought her flowers, not because they were special, but because she was. Every day, I tried to remind her that she mattered—through compliments, through small gestures, through the silent weight of devotion. She never asked for it, but I gave it anyway. That’s what love was to me: not a transaction, not an exchange, but a steady river flowing in one direction. She knew she couldn’t return it. I knew it too, though I never said it out loud. Her heart wasn’t cruel, just elsewhere. That’s the thing people don’t understand: unrequited love isn’t always tragedy. Sometimes it’s just geography—her feelings lived in a country I could never travel to, no matter how many maps I studied. And yet, I kept loving her. Even though I shouldn’t have. Even though each gesture was a reminder that I’d never be more than the friend who cared too much. It wasn’t fair, not to her, not to me. But fairness had nothing to do with it. Love, at least the way I knew it, was never about being repaid. It was about holding someone in the quiet parts of your soul, even when they don’t hold you back. In the end, she walked her way, and I stayed behind, carrying the poems, the flowers, the small rituals of devotion that no longer had a place to go. Sometimes at night, I still imagine what it would have been like if she had loved me the way I loved her. But imagination is a dangerous thing. It turns loneliness into something bearable. Almost beautiful. Almost.