The thing about unrequited love is that it feels like drowning in air – technically possible, statistically improbable, and yet somehow happening to you anyway. That night, as I lay in bed watching the artificial glow of streetlights make abstract paintings on my ceiling, I couldn't stop thinking about The Day. Capital T, capital D – The Day I realized I was hopelessly, catastrophically in love with her.

Here's what happens when you fall for someone who doesn't love you back: first, you try to negotiate with yourself. You create elaborate metaphors about how she's like this rare astronomical phenomenon that you're lucky just to witness. You tell yourself that loving her from afar is enough, like how people can survive on those meal replacement shakes. But it isn't enough. It's never enough.

The human heart is this ridiculously persistent organ that keeps hoping even when your brain is screaming at it to stop. Mine kept whispering maybe, maybe, maybe, like some sort of cardiac morse code.

I started hating the things I loved most about her – how she could make a joke about mitochondria being the powerhouse of the cell and somehow make it both nerdy and adorable, how her laugh had this specific cadence that made everyone around her want to laugh too, how her eyes crinkled at the corners when she was truly happy. The worst part? She knew. Of course she knew. You can't hide that kind of love any more than you can hide an elephant in a swimming pool.

She gave me something, though. She taught me that being alive isn't just about breathing and metabolizing nutrients – it's about feeling everything, even when everything hurts. But God, did it hurt.

The human body is approximately 60% water, and I'm pretty sure I cried out at least 30% of mine when she started dating him. The laws of physics state that for every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction. But there was nothing equal about how much it destroyed me when she said yes to him, and how little it affected her at all.

I never let her see me cry. That would have been too much like admitting defeat, and if there's one thing worse than losing the person you love, it's letting them know they had the power to break you. So I smiled and congratulated her, like a supporting character in her romantic comedy, while my internal organs rearranged themselves into modern art.

Later, alone in my room, I became a living example of entropy – the gradual decline into disorder. I wonder if she ever thought about that version of me, the one falling apart in the dark. Probably not. And maybe that's okay.

Because here's the thing about healing: it doesn't happen in some great, cinematic moment. It happens in tiny increments, in the spaces between breaths, in the decision to keep moving forward even when moving hurts. So that's what I'm doing – moving forward, one infinitesimal step at a time, leaving behind a love that was never really mine to keep.