Page 189 of When the Storm Breaks
The warmth of what we had… and the fear of what we became.
Sometimes I wonder if love is supposed to feel like this—heavy and complicated and impossible to ignore.
Then again, maybe I never really learned what love is supposed to feel like at all.
I’ve spent most of my life feeling like I was too much. Too sensitive. Too complicated to love.
But Haiyden never made me feel that way. He always made me feel like enough. Exactly as I am.
It doesn’t make this easy… but maybe love was never meant to be easy.
Maybe it’s about choosing someone in spite of the hard parts. Maybe even because of them.
My thoughts spin in circles, but the longer I sit with them, the clearer something becomes:
I’m not the same person I was before him.
I used to think something in me needed fixing. That I was too broken to be anything whole.
But Haiyden never tried to fix me. He just saw me. And somehow, that was enough.
Love was never going to be the butterfly—light and effortless. It’s the chrysalis. Tight. Painful. Quiet. The part no one talks about.
But maybe that’s where the change happens. Where something new begins to grow.
He hurt me. But he also met me in all the places I didn’t know still needed care. And maybe that’s what love is—not the absence of pain, but the willingness to stay through the healing.
I forgive him.
Not because he asked me to—but because our pain doesn’t have to be the thing that defines us.
And I forgive myself, too.
For needing space to understand my own heart. For taking time to learn who I was without him, so I could choose him for the rightreasons.
I move to the nightstand and pick up the small, crumpled butterfly.
The paper’s worn soft at the edges, creased from how many times I’ve unfolded it and refolded it, trying to make sense of what it meant.
Now, I think I understand.
It wasn’t a promise.
It was a hope.
A belief that something delicate can survive the storm.
I realize it then: choosing him doesn’t mean losing myself. That’s what he’s given me—the space to be whole beside him, not because of him.
I can’t change his past. But I can choose him anyway.
And for the first time, that choice doesn’t scare me.
I grab my suitcase and zip it shut.
Slip the butterfly into my pocket—right where his hand used to rest when we walked side by side.
Then I step outside and breathe in the cool summer air.
