The hardest loves to bury are the ones you gave your whole heart to, because you're not only grieving the person. You're grieving the part of yourself that believed love, if given wholeheartedly, would be enough. It mourns the version of you that loved without holding anything back.
Maybe that's why it's so hard to love again.
Maybe that's why loving again feels so frightening.
Not because you have less love to give, but because you already know what it feels like to give everything and still end up empty-handed. You start fearing hope. You hesitate at every beginning, wondering if it's just another ending waiting for the right time to introduce itself.
So when someone new comes along, your heart wants to believe.
Your memory just whispers, "Look what happened the last time you did.
So here I am, for the hundredth time, measuring my worth with a ruler that only gets shorter, wondering if I loved too loudly, cared too deeply, or simply existed too much.
And there are my friends, exhausted from reminding me that love was never meant to be measured in smaller pieces, that I've always been enough.
hormones rani