As we got to know each other better, I began discovering the less beautiful parts of life, too.
Behind the smile that had become so familiar to me, there was a whole world I still knew very little about.
A complicated family.
A younger brother who needed attention.
An uncertain living situation.
Money that had to be carefully managed.
Plans that depended on work, circumstances, and sometimes other people’s decisions.
I was beginning to understand that the smile I loved seeing sometimes concealed more than I could imagine.
That behind the eyes that had made me so happy, there were worries I hadn’t noticed during those days by the sea.
The stories about those difficulties came in fragments.
Sometimes just a few sentences.
Other times, longer messages that I had to translate carefully.
Occasionally, the translation app turned a serious explanation into something almost impossible to understand.
I read it again.
I asked questions.
I tried to understand.
I didn’t want to fix anyone’s life.
I couldn’t have, even if I’d tried.
I simply wanted there to be a place where the truth could be spoken without fear of judgment.
A place where no one had to pretend to be happy when they no longer had the strength.
I had also learned about an important relationship from the past.
A story that had come close to marriage before eventually ending.
I didn’t see it as a competition.
I didn’t want to compare myself to someone from the past.
Everyone carries memories, choices, wounds, and chapters they cannot erase.
And I had plenty of chapters of my own.
I wasn’t interested in competing with a past I hadn’t been part of.
What mattered to me was what we were trying to build in the present.
Sometimes, when I saw that smile on my screen, I forgot for a moment about all the difficulties we’d discussed.
Other times, I wondered what was hiding behind it.
How many thoughts remained unspoken.
How many nights were spent worrying.
How exhausting it must be to appear fine when life was anything but simple.
I wanted to be there on the difficult days, too.
Not just on the days filled with laughter, sweet messages, and plans for October.
But on the days when there was no energy left.
When words were difficult to find.
When silence was needed more than conversation.
To me, love was beginning to mean that, too.
Not demanding a smile all the time.
Not loving only the easiest parts of a person.
Being willing to stay close even when there was nothing beautiful to talk about.
One day, I received a message that made me stop whatever I was doing.
The words, in their own way, told me that I was the light in that person’s life.
I read them once.
Then again.
And once more.
They made me happy.
But somewhere beneath that happiness, I felt a quiet fear.
I didn’t want to be anyone’s only source of light.
I didn’t want someone’s entire happiness to depend on my presence.
I wanted to be a beautiful part of someone’s life.
Not their entire salvation.
But in that moment, caught up in the tenderness of those words, I held them close to my heart.
Perhaps because I needed to hear them.
Perhaps because I wanted so badly to believe that what I felt was being felt on the other side, too.
I had begun to wonder whether we understood love in different ways.
To me, closeness meant opening the door even when the house was a mess.
Letting someone see the unfinished things.
The fear.
The exhaustion.
The days when you have no answers.
I believed those were the moments when two people needed to talk the most.
Only later would I begin to understand that, for some people, closeness can also bring the urge to withdraw.
That sometimes a person closes the door not necessarily because they no longer feel anything, but because they don’t know how to let someone else see what’s happening inside.
I didn’t know whether that would turn out to be the explanation for us.
Back then, I had no reason to imagine an ending.
We were still making plans.
Still searching for each other through our screens.
Still counting the days.
I still believed that any problem could be talked through if two people wanted badly enough to understand each other.
Maybe I was naive.
Maybe I was brave.
Maybe a little of both.
All I know is that I didn’t want to know only the face illuminated by sunlight, the gaze from the seafront, or the smile that made me forget the rest of the world.
I wanted to know the darker days, too.
The ordinary days.
The days when life looked nothing like a holiday.
And I didn’t consider that a sacrifice.
It was simply the way I loved.
I didn’t know then that you could be willing to stand beside someone in the darkness and still be unable to stop the door from closing.
To be continued…
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