Falling in love is new. Fresh and exciting. It’s like spring without the pollen. It is perfect temperatures and pretty flowers. It’s trees with fresh green and dew in the morning. Falling in love is beautiful. 

Slowly, this person becomes less new, but still all the exciting. The routine settles, you finally have a new normal, and now the seasons start to change, but it doesn’t matter. Because every day, you find something new to fall in love with. Every moment is lovely. The kisses taste like honey, the hugs are like large blankets, and their presence is warmth personified. 

You love them selflessly, so much so that you lose yourself. All of your focus is on making them happy, because only then are you satisfied. You lose friends and isolate yourself because you’ve never experienced this level of beauty before. How could anything ever match this? 

Until one day, it’s not beautiful anymore. One day, the pollen returns and you see what makes spring so distasteful again. Your allergies return and take away from some of the good that’s been associated with this new love. So, resentment starts, and even then, you stay. 

Fall rolls around, the leaves change, the wind picks up, and winter is biting at you. It’s so close, but you don’t care because last winter was warm with your love. Their hugs hold you tight and keep you warm, but now a breeze starts to creep through, and more resentment builds. But that’s okay because you’re so close to returning to spring. 

But you don’t make it to spring. Winter starts to swallow you whole and frostbite consumes you, so you’re left alone. You slowly forget the taste of honey, the feeling of large blankets, and you’re left cold without their presence. 

How do you rebuild for spring? Can you just smile and forget? But you can’t. So you try to rush the seasons to change, but you’re no Mother Nature. So, how do you move on? Especially when the other is already in a new phase of seasons? 

You breathe, and remember the honey, blankets and warmth of the other. But that hurts too much, so you rot in the winter you were left in. Until one day, the sun peeks through, and you sneeze because of that god-forsaken pollen. You smile, because even with your constant disdain for it, it shows change. 

There’s no right way to express yourself after a hurt. There’s no right way to feel after losing someone who could tell you where every freckle on your body may lay. 

There are only wrong ways, and even then, you’ll never know what they are until you try them. How do you unlearn to love someone? You can’t. You learn to love without them. 

Then one day, you see them, but you’re both in a different season, and your heart yearns for them, but their heart does nothing. So then, you’re back in wintertime, just hoping for that pesky pollen to start tickling your nose. And you sit in winter, with only the knowledge that it’s you who did the wrong, not the other person.