What It Truly Means to Love

Her Ending

She doesn't know what propelled her to do it.

Why after an entire agonizing year she decided to expose her secret.

He was leaving to go back home anyway.

Why now?

In her defense, she'd told her friend.

But her friend was his first.

And when he stood before, his jaw clenched in anger, his eyes ablaze in fury, she felt so small, so insignificant. A bug in his world.

A bug which didn't belong.

He accused her of horrible things.

He challenged the authenticity of her feelings.

And asked her why she'd take advantage of his vulnerability and imprint her own desire on him.

She was meant to be listening to him.

And she had listened.

He didn't understand that the listening was the reason in the end.

Of why the butterflies struggled to rise in her stomach.

"It's unfair." He whispered when he had summoned the last of his rage. "It's unfair that I'm the bad guy for not loving you in return."

And at that moment she looked up and finally met his eyes for the last time.

"You could never be the bad guy."

And so she was the one to turn her back from him that day.

She turned around in the chilling cold, and bit down on her lip because her love was stronger than a few tears.

She zipped up her pink coat to the base of her neck and walked as long as her legs could carry her.

And she didn't look back.

But neither did he.

Because that's what she meant to him.

A finished chapter in the storybook of his life.

But he was the entire book for her.