Prologue

I was 16

When you are young, love feels like something straight out of a story—something big, intense, and a little bit magical. You grow up listening to songs and reading tales that tell you love is supposed to feel forbidden, thrilling, and all-consuming; that if it makes you wait, if it makes you ache, if it feels like a secret only the two of you understand, then it must be real. You believe that the things worth having are the things you have to fight for, hide for, and sacrifice everything to keep.

I once believed that too.

Back then, I thought I had found the kind of love people write about. It felt like a dream come true—meeting someone who felt so far above anything I had ever known, someone who made me feel seen, special, and chosen in a way no one ever had before. Everything about it felt exciting, like stepping into a world that was entirely ours, closed off from everyone else. The parts that felt wrong, the parts that made me hide, the parts that left me waiting or hurting? I convinced myself those were just proof of how deep it went. I told myself we were different, that what we had was too rare and too precious for anyone else to understand.

I gave everything I had to hold onto that feeling. I put my own life, my own hopes, and my own worth on hold, just to be close to it. I ignored every quiet voice inside me that said this wasn’t right, every sign that I was giving far more than I was ever getting back, every warning that I was slowly losing pieces of myself just to fit into a space that was never truly made for me. I thought that if I loved hard enough, waited long enough, and gave enough of myself, eventually it would turn into everything I ever wanted.

But time has a way of showing you the truth, even when you spend years trying to hide from it.

Looking back now, I know what I really fell in love with wasn’t a person at all—it was the illusion of one. It was the thrill of being noticed, the comfort of feeling important, and the dream of having something that felt bigger than my own small world. What I mistook for love was never love at all. It was attention, easy and convenient, something that was never meant to last, never meant to be mine fully, never meant to give me the happiness I was so desperate for.

This is not a love story. It is the story of how easy it is to confuse a dream with reality, of how we give away the best parts of ourselves for things that only ever hurt us, and of the painful, beautiful lesson we all learn eventually: that the thing you think you want the most is often never what you truly deserve.

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