I loved you quietly, the way people love things they are afraid to lose.

You never noticed, of course. To you, we were exactly what the world saw, two best friends who shared playlists, inside jokes, late-night calls, and stories we never told anyone else. We were a safe place for each other, but only in the ways you understood safety.

I was the friend who listened.
You were the friend who never had to ask if I would stay.

But there were things I never said. Not because I lacked the words, but because I feared what would happen if I used them.

So instead of speaking, I wrote.

Not one letter. Not two. I wrote dozens. Pages and pages of everything I never let reach my mouth—love, longing, confusion, anger, hope. Letters I folded and hid inside notebooks, in drawers, in the silence between who we were and who I wanted us to be.

You and I used to talk about everything. Except the one thing that mattered most to me.

I remember one afternoon, the kind of memory no one else would think twice about. We were sitting on the steps outside your house, sharing a bag of chips and arguing about whether the sky looked more blue or violet that day. You laughed, and I looked at you, really looked, and something inside me settled into a truth I would spend years trying to undo:

I am already in love with you. And you do not even know.

You kept talking. I kept pretending.

Every time you told me about a girl you liked, I nodded. Every time you asked, “Why don’t you ever date anyone?” I lied. Every time you said, “I do not know what I would do without you,” I swallowed the thousand things I wanted to do with you, for you, beside you.

I did not write those letters because I hoped you would one day read them.
I wrote them because it was the only way I could survive loving you in silence.

Love can be loud, but mine was a whisper. A constant, quiet ache.

Years passed. We stayed close, but life stretched around us, the way time does when two people are tied together by history instead of honesty. I kept writing. You kept not knowing.

And then one day, without drama, without breaking, without warning, I realized something:

I was not waiting for you anymore.
I was waiting for me.

So I gathered the letters. All of them. Some angry, some aching, some filled with the kind of softness that hurt to read. And I did something I never planned to do:

I turned them into a book.

Not a confession. Not a plea. Not a hope for you to finally look at me and say, Oh. It was always you.

It was a book for all the people like me, people who loved quietly, who stayed too long, who mistook devotion for destiny.

And when it was published, people wrote to me. Not you. Strangers.
They said: I have lived this story too.
They said: I thought I was the only one.
They said: I finally feel less foolish for feeling so much.

And somewhere in all of that, I found peace I never got from your reassurance, your attention, or your nearness.

Writing those letters was not what saved me.
Sharing them was.

Because the truth is: the love I had for you did not need to be returned to be real.
It only needed to be released.

You never knew the book was about you. You never asked.
And I stopped needing you to.

People think closure is a conversation, a final moment, a mutual understanding. But sometimes closure is just the day you wake up and realize the story does not hurt anymore. That you can remember without bleeding. That silence does not feel like loss, it feels like freedom.

We still speak sometimes. In messages. In updates. In that vague, polite way people do when they once knew everything about each other. I do not love you anymore, not in the way I did, not in the way I wrote. But I do not regret a single word.

Because those letters taught me how to feel deeply without apologizing for it.
They taught me that love that goes unreturned is not wasted—only redirected.
They taught me that sometimes the person who teaches you how to love is not the person you will love forever.

And eventually, softly, quietly, without trying, I did find love.
Love that did not require hiding.
Love that did not live in the unsent.
Love that did not stay in drafts.

But that is another story.
And it does not begin with you.

This one does.
And this one ends here.