falling

I have fallen in love. The longing-filled, bittersweet kind of love. I keep checking my phone, playing and replaying songs, reminding myself of all those smiles and kisses and intertwined fingers, and I just want to cry.

I get that awful, horrible feeling in my gut, that hole in my chest, that hollowed out space that definitely wasn't there before, and I just keep thinking about how close to not-happening the whole thing was. How it all seemed lined out and scripted from day one, how I struggled with fate, how I battled the universe on this, and how everybody saw it, everybody except us. I keep thinking about what we could have had years earlier, how we tried and tried to ignore it. Maybe it was meant to be. Maybe it wasn't.

 

Friends to lovers is one of my favourite tropes in fiction, because it shows that good relationships are not only dating someone, but dating your friend, maybe even your best friend. How much easier it is to skip all that getting to know each other because you already do, you've already had known each other in and out for years, how you don't have to explain anything because they've seen you at your worst and at your best. If you have a base on anything other than that thing called love, if you have something to build on, it just all seems so much more predestined. Maybe that's it, maybe it seems meant to be because we've always gotten along so well, because we've always been able to laugh together, to be there for each other, there's always been so much trust between us that a romantic relationship wasn't actually that big of a step - or an especially big one.
Falling for someone is a difficult thing for me. Or rather, falling for someone and then letting them in. Letting them see my heart and my mind, letting them participate and help. I only have few very good friends for that exact same reason: I have a hard time opening up to people. So maybe it isn't that surprising at all to find the person I'd fall in love with already inside the walls instead of miles away from the medival castle I've built to contain my feelings. He's been there for years, helping me mend the walls when somebody hurt me, trying to keep me from building another one, trying to keep me calm when I thought I'd be failing for sure. He's made me laugh countless times, even though I tried to hide it in the early years, but still he kept trying to cheer me up. He kept trying to get me to maybe switch out my castle for something easier to visit. A nice little cottage in the forest maybe. Thinking about it, I'd actually quite like the look of that.