After Rashied spoke, my heart stopped for a moment and my ears could not believe the words he had just uttered. I turned around and saw him kneeling on his knees, his eyes flooded with tears.

“I’m dying … I have lung cancer, stage 4, and the doctors said I don’t have long before …” Rashied said, sniffing before he could finish his sentence.

After listening to Rashied speak, I knelt down to his level. I then tried extending my arms to him, holding him close, and telling him I forgave him. I tried to sympathizing with him, but my ego and heartache would not let me. I could not.

“For 5 years, I waited for you to contact me, but there was no phone call, no text, no nothing. I felt like I was dying, and I died a little every day with your silence,” I said, crying.

While I was crying, I searched my handbag for something I had always wanted to give Rashied. I then took out a bunch of letters I had written to him but never sent. Bundled together, the letters were my true emotions, my therapy.

“This is my last gift to you, and may it bring you the peace you require. But, as far as we’re concerned, I’m done seeing you. I’m sorry, but I can’t keep doing this. You say you love me, but all you do is hurt me. This is not love,” I said while walking off to the sound of Rashied’s incessant sobbing.

While I was walking away, I did not look back, I could not. I had finally turned my cold back towards the once beautiful sunset that was now marred by the sadness of the ocean, and the sky darkened as the setting of the sunlight dimmed on our past encounter.

**********

As I drove home, I thought about the letters I had given to Rashied, and how they had helped me overcome my depression over him. I had read them so many times, I remembered how each of them went.

“Dear Rashied.

I miss you. I wish I could tell you how much I miss you, but you don’t care. You hurt me every time. You make me feel small and ugly, and even though you make me question my worth, I still miss you very much. I still love you so much, and I hope you’re okay.”

Another one read:

“Rashied, you are the love of my life, my soul-mate, but why did you ghost me? Are you tired of me? Don’t you like me as much as I like you? I cry myself to sleep at night, wondering if I did something wrong to you. Don’t you miss me? Because you haven’t contacted me. Did you find someone new?”

And another one read:

“Rashied, today is hard. I can’t stop thinking about you, and when I close my eyes, I dream about you. Why do you haunt me when you aren’t even around? I don’t think I can love another like I love you. Is love this painful, or is this simply just a distraction disguised as hurt or a life lesson?”

Reminiscing about the difficult time I had gone through made me burst into immense tears, and I had to stop the car along the road. My stream of heartache had finally run its course.

“How could he do this to me?” I thought to myself. “How could he be so selfish? He came back into my life, just to leave me again? How could I be so evil? I need to go back to the beach. I need to tell him I still love him. I need to tell him I’m sorry.”

While thinking, I knew I was not an evil person, but hurt changes us. It turns us into people we hate before we even realise it. I was not going to let the hurt consume me though, but I was also not going to be a fool for love again. It was a hard situation knowing that I loved someone who, even though they loved me too, they could not reciprocate their love. They only knew that they hurt, and that that was why they hurt.

I loved Rashied, but my hurt controlled the actions of my love for him. So, I immediately rushed back to the beach and raced to the spot where our picnic was. But, when I got there, he was once again not there. He was gone, and all that was left was a lonesome bud of one of the roses he had gifted me with. It was laying on top of a sand-hill, but it was later blown away by the gentle wind of the night air and ocean breeze, then it got washed away by the ebb and flow of the evening tide, as if to signify the end of our love story.

While looking at the petal, I felt like I had lost Rashied again. My heart became sore, and my heart had never felt as hurt as it did that moment.

***

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