A Quiet Corner That Once Was – Written for the Unspoken Whispers of the Heart

🌿 A Quiet Corner That Once Was

“No one dies from losing someone.
The world keeps turning even when one hand slips from another.”

Tonight, in mid-July 2025, during a quiet moment after a long stretch of introspection, I decided to write a few lines, as a gentle farewell to a small, silent corner of my heart. Perhaps this is an ending, or simply an ellipsis for unnamed uncertainties and emotions that once stirred my soul, sometimes delicately, yet enough to weigh it down.

Throughout my school years, I never entered a relationship in the truest sense of the word. Not because no one came close, but because I always kept my distance, a quiet fear I never knew how to name. Perhaps it was philophobia, the fear of falling in love. I once rejected love outright, felt suffocated by happy couples, and even “despised” them as a form of self-defense. I hold no resentment toward my parents, but I often wonder: if I had grown up in a home where love and understanding between them ran deeper, would I still view marriage through such a bleak lens?

2025 has been a year of profound change. Standing at the threshold between student life and the real world, I’ve started to re-examine my emotions, especially when it comes to love.

I once turned down someone who liked me, giving the same old reason: “I’m afraid of love.” Yet three months away on an internship, driving on my own, becoming independent, navigating new relationships, changed me, bit by bit. I grew curious, more open. And then came him, the one who helped me lower my guard, if only slightly. He wasn’t anyone extraordinary, yet he was the first to hold my hand, after helping me with something trivial. That touch had no label, no title, no promise.

He cared for me, walked beside me through conversations and little outings. Perhaps we both felt something. But the invisible gap between two people too afraid to be clear, remained. Neither of us ever acknowledged our feelings, and just like that, everything faded as if nothing had ever begun.

Returning to my old life was hard. Memories of him, though vague, lingered painfully. I told myself that forgetting was the only way. But forgetting is never easy, especially when those memories are the only ones that ever made your heart truly tremble.

And then, someone else appeared. He came like a whirlwind, intense, direct, overwhelming. “To forget someone, love someone else,” he said. Foolishly, I believed him. I stepped into something that felt more like a psychological game than a relationship. I tried to be with him, as a way to escape my past feelings. Maybe I was cruel, to him, and to myself.

Dating someone my age, or younger, turned out to be more confusing than I imagined. He rushed things, and I found myself overwhelmed, pulled into something I didn’t yet understand. I often wondered: Was it my lack of experience, my immaturity, that made me act so clumsily, so irrationally?

But now I see: every misstep, every flutter of the heart, is part of growing up. I’m no longer afraid of love the way I used to be, but I also won’t let myself be ruled by it, especially not by fleeting, undefined emotions.

They say, “No one dies from losing someone. The world keeps turning even when one hand slips from another.” And I believe that. Time will blur it all, will heal me, and him, so that we may continue walking our separate paths.

I write this not to hold on to anyone, but to preserve a fragment of youth. To remember how I once was, foolish, fragile, daring to love, and learning to let go. A quiet corner in my heart, once warm, once so real.

Even if all of it fades into nothingness, I still wish him happiness, with someone more right.
As for me, I will keep living. I will keep learning how to love.

Some stories don’t need an ending.
They just need to be remembered, softly.