Inaro by Mariegold Echavez Jabla

This story is part of the Make it Bitter or Make it Better Writing Challenge, where we invited writers to explore the storytelling possibilities of a simple situation. We gave authors free reign to interpret the prompt as they see fit, provided that they give their story a clear ending.

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Inaro,

Loving you has become so painful, and love is not that. At least not for me. Love is peace and liberation, not pain and suffocation. I used to think I could endure anything as long as it was you. I used to think that loving quietly was still loving fully. I used to think that if I stayed soft enough, patient enough, understanding enough, you would one day wake up brave.

But love is not a waiting room.

You couldn’t give me the only thing that I need, bravery. Not flowers. Not promises whispered at 1 a.m. Not hands that reach for me only in rooms without witnesses. I did not need grand gestures. I needed courage. The kind that says my name out loud. The kind that chooses me when it is inconvenient. The kind that risks comfort.

You couldn’t be brave to choose me, and you couldn’t be brave to tell me that you don’t.

That was the part that slowly hollowed me out.

If you had told me you did not love me enough, I would have mourned honestly. I would have respected it. I would have stitched myself up around a clean wound.

But you loved me in halves. In shadows. In pauses between other obligations. You loved me like something precious you were afraid to display.

And I loved you like something sacred I was never afraid to claim.

I refuse to believe that there was a shortness of love. I refuse to believe that you didn’t love me through those seven, maybe eight years. You love me, alam ko. I saw it in the way your voice softened when you were tired. I saw it in the way you memorized the way I take my coffee. I saw it in the way your hands would search for mine in the dark.

But love is not just feeling.

It is choosing. And you could not choose.

I am not begging you to stay or choose me now. If this letter has reached you, it is not an invitation. It is a confession that has already lived its life inside me.

I still love you.

Embarrassing as it is, I still wanted to marry you. I wanted to grow old with you. I imagined mornings that were not rushed and holidays that did not need explanation. I imagined introducing you without lowering my voice. I imagined building something that did not need to be hidden.

But not like this.

Not to who you have become. Or maybe to who you have always been this time the whole person I never fully met because you would not let me. And if my love wasn’t enough for that, it’s okay. Maybe not in this lifetime.

I need you to understand something that will sit with you long after this letter is folded away:

I did not leave because I stopped loving you.

I left because I started loving myself in a way that demanded daylight.

Our love was celebrated in the shadows of your shame and inability to be man enough to choose. And maybe I was the comfort and the love that you had always wanted when I was understanding, quiet and timid. Maybe I was easy to keep when I asked for little. When I convinced myself that crumbs were a feast.

But I became a liability when my heart started to become antsy and started to demand acknowledgment and loud reciprocation of the love that I have given.

Love should be excessive in its honesty.

It should be unafraid.

I want you to look at me, even if only through these words and see that this is what love looks like. Freeing. Liberating. Full of bravery.

Do you know what breaks me the most?

It is not that you did not choose me.

It is that you could have.

You had years.

Years where I was still there, still soft, still hoping. Years where one brave sentence from you would have changed everything. Years where I would have built a life with you without resentment.

I was not asking you to save me. I was asking you to stand beside me.

There is a difference.

I will let you go now, in the knowledge that my love is brave. That I have and always will love with fierceness and the pure ability to love not because I needed to be loved in return or that I needed your love to survive and keep me afloat.

I did not love you out of lack.

I loved you out of abundance.

And that is something you must live with now, the knowledge that you were loved by a woman who did not need you, but chose you anyway.

That is rare.

You will meet women who admire you. You will meet women who fit conveniently into your life. You may even meet women who love you in ways that are quieter, easier, less demanding of courage.

But you will not be loved like this again.

You will not be loved by someone who saw your fear and still believed you could rise above it.

You will not be loved by someone who waited not because she was weak, but because she believed in your potential to be brave.

Whatever love I have given you, keep it because you needed it and you would probably never find it again. I have more of that where it came from.

That is not arrogance. That is peace.

I am resigned in the love that I gave you. I do not regret it. I do not wish it back. I do not wish you harm.

But you must understand what you have lost.

You broke the heart of an honest woman.

Not a manipulative one.

Not a careless one.Not a woman who loves you because she needs you.

An honest one.

A woman who said what she felt.Who stayed when it was hard.Who asked directly.

Who loved loudly in private and would have loved you even louder in public.

You cannot return to the comfort of believing that this ended because you simply walked away.

You cannot tell yourself that maybe you did not love me enough.

You cannot soften the narrative into something that protects your ego.

You know.

You know that I loved you fiercely.

You know that I wanted you fully.

You know that you had the chance to be brave.

And you know that you did not take it.

If this letter has reached you, it means the silence between us is already final.

I am not writing to reopen anything. I am writing because the truth deserves air at least once.

I release you without bitterness.

But not without consequence.

The consequence is this: you will carry my memory, the memory of a woman who loved you with liberation and courage, and you will measure every future love against it. And most especially the one you have now.

And somewhere, in each quiet moment, you will wonder what your life would have looked like if you had simply chosen.

Inaro ta ka. Sika labat.

And that was the bravest thing I ever did.

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