TheGioBlog

i’m not going to start with the triviality of writing his name here,

maybe because names are too small for people who end up occupying entire cities inside of you.

the truth is, i hate the way he entered my life without ever promising permanence. like someone arriving late at a station, catching the first train, and somehow still managing to alter someone else’s entire route.

after him, none of my plans remained entirely mine.

london, for example, stopped being only an old dream carefully protected since childhood. it stopped being just the city i loved because of my grandfather’s stories, because of the london accent, the cold streets, the old bookstores, and the memory of crying while leaving it behind in 2017. suddenly, london had him walking through it beside me.

i can picture it with an irritating level of clarity.

cold hands during winter.
a stupid argument about which tube line to take.
him complaining about the weather while i pretended the rain made everything prettier.
the two of us getting lost in some old street as if we had time.

and i hate that.

i hate that i placed someone inside dreams that used to belong only to me.

i hate feeling like i was almost something official without ever being fully chosen.
like i was constantly being evaluated.
like there was some invisible deadline counting against me the entire time.

i hate hearing “i love you” while still missing the smallest actions that, to me, would have meant everything.

because i know how to survive on my own.
that was never the problem.

i know how to cross oceans without leaning on anyone.
i know how to build a career, a future, stability.
i know how to survive.

but surviving was never the dream.

the dream was sharing it.

showing the world to someone while we were still young, before life hardens everything. before responsibilities turn love into logistics and routine into polite silence.

i wanted to show him london.
i wanted to drag him through old bookstores, hidden pubs, and grey streets that make me feel alive in a way i can never fully explain.
i wanted to hear him complain about the rain while i insisted it made the city even more beautiful.

i also wanted to see japan with him someday.

to walk through tokyo at night completely overwhelmed by the lights and the noise.
to quietly explore tiny streets and old temples together.
to watch him experience a culture i’ve admired for so long, the kind of place that always felt almost unreal to me growing up.
i wanted to share that feeling with someone.

and maybe one of the cruelest parts is realizing i will probably live all of that without him.

not because my life depends on a man. it doesn’t.

but because he occupied spaces inside me that i didn’t even know existed before him.

now every time i think about the future, i instinctively try to place him somewhere inside it before remembering he may have already left the story a long time ago.

some songs feel contaminated now.
radiohead became memory.
that ridiculous piercing became one of my favorite details about him.
small things suddenly started carrying too much weight.

the way he looked at me when he was calm.
the almost imperceptible change in his voice when he was tired.
random conversations.
ordinary nights that somehow felt important simply because they happened beside him.

and there’s an irony that is difficult to admit:

leaving him hurts more than leaving england ever did.

maybe because england never made me afraid of losing it.
it always existed as a possible destination.

he didn’t.

and somehow, some deeply stupid part of me kept trying to stay.

kept believing maybe he would choose to grow with me instead of running away when things became difficult.
that maybe there would be enough courage to adjust our dreams around each other instead of retreating from them.

because i would have tried.

for the first time, i truly would have tried.

everyone knows my dreams come first. traveling as a journalist, studying abroad, building a bridge toward a much bigger dream that almost nobody fully knows about yet. i would never abandon that.

but maybe what nobody understands is that, for the first time, i wanted someone capable of walking beside me without asking me to abandon the path itself.

i would have crossed airports, crises, differences, insecurities.
i would have built an entire future brick by brick if i had felt that he genuinely wanted to live inside it too.

but loving someone alone turns even dreams into weight.

and maybe that’s what hurts the most now.

not the ending itself, but the melancholic realization that the future still exists normally without the presence of someone who, for a while, felt inseparable from it.

and i think about all of this sitting in an emergency room chair, in pain, staring at a future that still exists in front of me.

just not in the way i imagined it with him inside of it.