To the One I Loved Once, and Still Cannot Hate.
I came across these words recently, and something inside me went terribly quiet. Maybe because, for the first time, I found an explanation for a part of myself I had been trying so desperately to understand. There is a part of my mind that still refuses to hate you, no matter how many reasons I gather against you, no matter how carefully I arrange the evidence of everything you have done to me. I have given myself countless reasons to despise you, to make a stranger out of the person I once called mine, to convince my heart that you no longer deserve the tenderness it continues to reserve for you. And yet, somehow, I fail at the very thing I have been trying to teach myself.
What I am going through now is, in many ways, the aftermath of what you left behind. I do not wish to turn my suffering into an accusation, nor do I want to make you the villain of every unfortunate thing that has happened to me. Life is rarely that simple, and I have always believed that pain deserves to be understood before it is assigned a name. But there are truths I cannot keep softening merely because they concern you. Some of my anxieties have your fingerprints on them. Some of my silences were born in the places where your words should have been. And some of the things I am struggling to recover from are the very things I once overlooked because I loved you.
That is the frightening part, isn't it? To know exactly where someone hurt you and still remember the warmth of their hands. To understand that a person can become the source of your deepest unrest and remain, somewhere in the recesses of your heart, a place you instinctively long to return to. I miss you, even when I know better. I write about you, even when I promise myself that this will be the last time. I cry for you, sometimes without warning. And beneath all the resentment I have tried to cultivate, there remains a quiet, almost embarrassing respect for the person you were to me, or perhaps for the person I believed you to be.
Sometimes, I wonder whether this inability to hate you is proof of how deeply I loved you. Other times, I wonder whether it is simply the cruel persistence of memory, refusing to distinguish between what once made me happy and what eventually made me ache. Maybe love does not disappear when its reasons collapse. It just lingers like the scent of rain in an abandoned room, long after the windows have been shut and the person who once lived there has left. The heart, unlike the mind, does not always understand the difference between remembering someone and belonging to them.
And the strangest thing is that I never fully understood the depth of my feelings when you were still beside me. I was living inside those moments, too occupied with the ordinary miracle of having you there to realise that one day I would be searching for you in the ruins of them. I did not know that an ordinary evening could become sacred simply because you were in it, or that a hand held casually in the present could become the one thing a person spends years trying to forget. I did not know that happiness could be so quiet while it was happening and so unbearably loud after it was gone.
Now, I find myself trying to construct a hatred strong enough to compete with my memories. I remind myself of everything that went wrong. I revisit the disappointments, the hurt, the moments that should have been enough to make me leave you behind. I try to turn every tender recollection into a warning, every beautiful memory into a lesson, every trace of affection into something I ought to outgrow. I keep searching for a final, undeniable reason to hate you, as though hatred might accomplish what love has failed to do: set me free.
But where do I begin when even my anger knows how to remember you gently?
I think of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, of Joel and Clementine consenting to have each other erased, hoping that the absence of memory might finally grant them the peace that being together could not. The idea has always seemed both beautiful and devastating to me. Imagine being able to enter the architecture of your own mind, to walk through its dimly lit corridors, to gather every memory of someone you once loved, and to watch each one disappear as though it had never existed. Imagine being given the impossible mercy of forgetting, because it mattered so much that remembering it has become unbearable.
If such a thing were possible, I think I would choose it.
I would erase the little moments first, but because they meant everything to me. The conversations, the laughter that belonged to a version of us who had not yet learned how things could fall apart. The ordinary places that became extraordinary simply because we had been there together. I would erase the memories in which I saw you looking at me as though loving me were the most natural thing in the world. I would erase that version of you, the one who seemed so certain, so familiar, so completely in love with me, that I sometimes struggle to believe he ever existed.
Because who was he? Where did he go? And how can someone who once felt like the safest place in the world become a person whose present existence is almost anonymous to me?
Sometimes, I think the cruelest part of losing someone is not the loss itself, but the impossibility of reconciling the person you remember with the person who remains. You carry an entire universe inside you, populated by the versions of them who once laughed with you, reached for you, held you close, and made promises with their eyes, if not their words. Meanwhile, the person outside your memories continues to exist beyond your understanding, becoming someone you no longer know how to recognise. You are left grieving someone who is still alive, someone whose name you could search for and whose face you might still recognise, yet whose place in your life has become somewhere you can no longer enter.
And then, just when I convince myself that everything was an illusion, that I invented the tenderness, that maybe I mistook temporary affection for something real, my mind betrays me with one small, impossibly vivid memory.
You holding my hand. We were walking beneath the yellow streetlights, and for a moment, the world seemed content to remain exactly as it was. There was only the warmth of your hand in mine, the yellow light spilling across the street, and the quiet, unremarkable beauty of being beside you.
I cannot explain why that memory survives. Maybe it is because it asks nothing of me. It does not demand that I forgive you. It does not insist that what we had was perfect, nor does it deny what happened afterwards. It simply exists, untouched by everything that came later. A small fragment of time in which I was happy, in which you were there, in which neither of us knew that one day I would be trying to forget the very thing I once wished would never end.
If I could enter my mind and erase you, I wonder whether I would hesitate at that street.
Would I watch the yellow lights disappear? Would I let go of your hand before the memory dissolved? Or would I stand there, caught between the person I am now and the person I was then, unable to decide whether freedom is worth the loss of one final moment with you?
Perhaps that is why I have never truly been able to hate you. Not because you have given me no reason to, and certainly not because love should excuse the things that wound us. But because the heart does not always surrender its history simply because the mind has understood the ending. I can acknowledge the hurt without pretending the happiness never happened. I can accept that you may no longer be the person I thought you were and still mourn the person I once knew. I can understand that we were not meant to remain together and still be grateful that, for a little while, we existed in the same beautiful, improbable chapter of life.
Maybe healing is not the art of turning love into hatred. Maybe it is learning to let a memory remain beautiful without allowing it to become a reason to return. Maybe it is understanding that I do not have to destroy the person you were in my memories to protect the person I am becoming. And maybe, someday, I will be able to remember you without feeling that something inside me is being asked to bleed again.
Until then, I will keep learning how to live with this strange contradiction: that I can know better and still miss you, that I can remember the hurt and still cherish the hand that once held mine, that I can wish never to have met you and, in the same breath, be grateful for the person I became while loving you.
I do not know whether I will ever forget you. Some people are not erased; they are simply moved, slowly and painfully, from the present tense into the past. And maybe the mind keeps certain memories because they have become part of the language through which we understand ourselves.
One day, your name will no longer feel like an unfinished sentence. And then, maybe I will pass beneath yellow streetlights and see nothing but the road ahead. Perhaps I will hear a song that once belonged to us and feel no need to search for the ghost of you in its melody. Perhaps I will finally stop collecting reasons to hate you because I will no longer need hatred to convince myself that I deserve peace.
Until that day, I suppose I must learn that I can love the memory of someone without loving what they did to me. I can grieve what we were without denying what we became. And I can carry the tenderness I once had for you without carrying the burden of waiting for you to become that person again.
"To the one I loved once, and still cannot hate"
You have given me enough reasons to let you go. More than enough reasons, perhaps, to become a stranger to everything that reminds me of you. And yet, somewhere inside me, there is still that girl walking beneath the yellow streetlights, her hand resting in yours, believing that some moments are too beautiful to end.
I wish I could tell her what I know now. I wish I could warn her that not every hand that finds yours is destined to hold it forever, that some hands are meant to become a part of your story, while others are meant to remain intertwined with yours until the very end. That even the warmest memories can become the coldest places to revisit, and that love, no matter how sincerely it is felt, cannot always save us from the very people we would have trusted with the task of saving us.
I do not wish to take that moment away from her.
She was happy. She loved you sincerely (which I never expressed). She did not yet know what she would have to survive, and I refuse to make her foolish for believing in something beautiful simply because it did not last.
So let her have the yellow streetlights. Let her keep the warmth of your hand. Let her remember the guy who once looked at her as though she were his whole world.
I will carry the truth that came afterwards.
And perhaps that is how I will finally begin to let you go, not by erasing every trace of you, not by forcing myself to hate the person I once loved, but by making peace with the fact that the person I remember and the man I know now may never again be the same person to me.
I loved you. I was hurt by you. I still miss you.
All three can be true.
And none of them means I have to find my way back to you.
~ Jaanu.
