He grazed her cheek with his left thumb, and his gaze asking her a something that should've never been a question in the first place.
She looked away.
"It's simple, Mira. You either love me or you don't." That statement, that one condescending assumption, has ripped God knows how many lives apart. We spend all our lives living with this binary notion about love — you either love just one person, or you love the other. That's it, no middle ground.
The idea that you might just be in love with more than one human has never been tolerated, and why should it? It's messy, complicated and harder to comprehend. And no one in this world is dumb enough to sell reality. Hence, we have all those fantastical rom-coms and soulmate crap that perpetrate the idea of "the one." And mind you, when you're a hopeless romantic, you eat that shit up like it's the world's best pizza.
And then reality hits you like a bazooka.
Sweetheart, you're an irrational, over-emotional, crazy, humid prepossessing Homo-sapien with full sized aortic pumps.
You're bound to race against everything and fall.
You're bound to wander on passages unknown, and love the dimly lit paths.
You're bound to find light in even the deepest of graves.
It's who you are.
The reality is that we'll love a lot of people throughout the course of our life, and sometimes we never stop loving a few of them.They might be miles away, or inches close. They might be strangers who once whispered life to your neck or best friends who have to hold it all inside. They might just be the one who got away, and you know, no one else could every be the same. When you love someone at 18 and then someone else a while later, the girl who loved him at 18 doesn't just go away. She's right there inside of you.
The skin he touched is still kissing your bones. The words he poured inside of you are still beating at your eardrum. His fingertips on your skin will never cease to be your favorite symphony. And when you see his name casually light up your screen (or a pigeon with his letter hit your window), it's OK to feel everything skip a beat.
...unless he's a psycho fuckboi you dumped five years ago.
But, none of that means that you love Mr. New any less. Perhaps you love him more than you ever loved anyone from your past. It's just that you love them both.
Or maybe, you've recently met the Salvatore brothers and started googling how-to's on Ménage à trois.
Don't beat yourself up about having these mixed feelings. You can't just dust it under the rug and pretend it's not there, just because people around you refuse to understand it. Or just generally give you shit for feeling what you feel. They're emotions. They're created for the sole purpose of being inexplicable. There isn't anything "binary" about the concept of love.
And remember, you aren't alone.
