The summer heat of my teenage years clung to my skin. I was crumpling some dull conversation into a paper ball when a friend request suddenly burst through the cicadas.
No introduction. Just a name that had been floating through the rumors of our grade.
When my fingertip tapped Accept, I heard an ancient bell toll deep in my soul:
Everything is over.
It wasn’t the flutter of a teenage crush. It wasn’t curiosity pulling me forward. It was fate staking its claim.
Like Sleeping Beauty seeing the prophecy of a hundred-year sleep before the spindle ever pierced her fingertip.
His message appeared on my screen soon after, casual as a pebble dropped into a still lake. But the path of that pebble was unmistakable: it struck the Pandora’s box I had spent more than a decade sealing shut—the one labeled love.
From that day on, I, the protagonist of my own rebellious story, made the oldest choice in the book.
I knew he was a wanderer. I knew the fairy tale would go no farther than the three seconds it took to accept a friend request.
And still, without looking back, I bet my whole heart on it.
Ten years have passed now.
Time handed me its cruel answer:
I was right about the falling.
I was wrong about the ending.
The Emotional Spare Tire on His Midnight Hotline
The story always began at midnight.
My phone would vibrate like a drop of liquor splashing across the screen. I knew the code. The bar had closed again, and once again, I was the medicine he reached for to sober up.
“You’re such a kid.”
I answered with a quiet laugh, my voice as tender as a lie I was selling myself.
Breathing came through the receiver from a room that sounded hollow.
A lighter ignited the past. The perfume of an old love floated through his breath. He counted them out for me—the ex, the new girl, the first love carved deepest into his bones.
“I’ll never escape her shadow for as long as I live.”
What about me?
The words were ground down between my lips and teeth until all that came out was an obedient:
“Mm-hm.”
The calls always withered around dawn.
I kept watch at the border of his dreams, then gently cut the line. Another wound appeared in my notebook:
Tonight he was completely sober, and still forgot to ask how I was doing.
At 5:20 a.m. on May 20—520, Chinese shorthand for I love you—I dialed the number he had personally told me I could call.
Three busy tones later, the world inside the receiver collapsed into a black hole.
The next day, he frowned.
“You woke me up.”
So 520 could mean I love you, while 5:20 was simply a morning that wasn’t supposed to be disturbed.
What would it take for you to love me?
The question dissolved in my throat into silence that tasted of rust.
I kept listening as he turned other girls into poems and treated me like a tree hollow that could not feel pain.
He stood so close—close enough to hear a ventricle splitting open inside me—and still never bent down to pull my drowning self ashore from that bottomless pool of calls.
The Ghost Lover Who Lived in My Notebook
After hanging up at three in the morning, I would always open the tin-covered notebook.
It was small, but large enough to hold a lover who never made a sound, and more than a decade of things I had never said.
On the first page was a promise from the years when youth still believed it had no reason for regret:
When the ink has filled these pages, I’ll give you back to the sea of people.
But every night, I broke that promise.
I wrote down the alcohol hidden in his voice, the confessions hardened in my throat, all the conversations that were never delivered.
Inside that imaginary kingdom, I crowned him. I gave three names to children forever out of reach, yet he never stepped into the territory I had cultivated with longing.
I don’t love you anymore.
On one page, I wrote the declaration with absolute resolve. The next day, I crossed it out viciously in black ink.
After high school, I chose to study abroad in the city where he had once lived.
I told my teachers I longed for the sea there. The truth was that I wanted to keep this grand monologue going beneath a sky he had once looked at.
At dusk in that foreign city, I was always stopping at street corners.
Every familiar line of a shoulder made my breath catch. Every pair of intertwined hands sent me fleeing. Like a night watchman, I collected every silhouette that looked a little like him.
I brought the notebook with me too, as if to confirm that an old illness with no cure was still lying quietly dormant.
He never knew that a city had once kept its lights on for him.
He never knew that, across every page where he was absent, someone kept using all the love she had reserved for him to rewrite the same sentence:
I still love you.
Loving You Was the Last Poetic Part of My Life
Ten years later, the notebook is still waiting for him on my behalf.
I have moved three times, cut my hair short three times, even let my wallet give way to digital payments. Still, it lies on top of my desk, like a night watchman who never makes a sound, keeping vigil over a homecoming that never came.
I rarely open it now. But when the pages brush against one another, I can still hear your breathing crossing time zones from those old nights—light as a dream, painful as waking.
Longing still arrives uninvited.
When Mayday’s Suddenly Missing You comes on after midnight, I still mistake some melody for a greeting from him. At the old café, sunlight gilds the empty chair into his outline.
A friend once asked why I didn’t start a new relationship.
I said I was waiting—not for him to turn back, but for the tsunami inside me to settle into ripples.
Everyone who came after him felt like a passerby. None of them could take away the mark he had left.
Eventually, I understood that the love was not a chain. It had grown into the bones of my life.
It could not be removed.
Maybe it did not need to be.
He had long since walked into a spring that belonged to someone else. I was still willing to live in the warmth that remained—just enough.
Drinking the coffee he loved became a ritual. Walking the roads he had walked became a dialogue.
Every breath seemed to finish a confession I had never completed.
If this was obsession, I let it grow into one person’s gentle faith.
For years, loving him felt like the last poetic part of my life.
Ten years later, I can finally name the difference:
The love was real.
The ten-year story was mine.
He had been part of it—in fragments.
I was the one who kept writing the rest.
Why can you love someone for years when they don’t love you back?
Because reality does not have to keep giving a relationship new chapters for the private version of it to keep growing. A late-night call, a moment of being needed, a familiar voice, a future imagined once and returned to many times—small pieces of closeness can keep feeding an attachment long after reciprocity has stopped.
Sometimes the relationship stops moving between two people long before it stops moving inside one of them.
I kept building a relationship in private long after reality stopped contributing to it.
That does not make those ten years imaginary.
The love was real.
What took me longer to understand was that the reality of my love and the reality of a shared relationship were not the same thing.
Have you ever kept loving someone long after the relationship existed mostly inside you?
If this brings someone to mind, you don’t have to tell me the whole story.
Tell me the one moment you still remember most clearly.
I’ll read from there.
I love how this confronts the sheer humiliation of hoping a tiny change in their behavior means they finally care, when it really just shows how uneven the balance is, Xiaobian.. 💔