Entry Three — “The Things I Never Said Out Loud”

There were so many things I wanted to say back then.

Things I wrote in margins, in notebooks, in half-finished poems

because I didn’t know how to speak them into the world.

I carried you in a way only a teenage girl can—

all heartbeat and hope,

all daydreams and disasters,

all or nothing with no in-between.

I remember watching you laugh with your friends,

pretending I wasn’t memorizing it.

I remember every moment that felt like a sign,

every look I replayed until it meant something,

every silence I tried to survive.

Back then, love felt like a tidal wave.

Like something bigger than me.

Like maybe if I held my breath long enough,

you’d finally turn around and see me standing there

already half-in love,

already half-broken.

I wrote so many lines that were really just questions:

Do you think of me?

Do you feel anything when you look at me?

Do you know you undo me without even trying?

I never said them out loud.

I didn’t know how.

I was afraid of the answer—

or maybe afraid of the truth.

But looking back now,

I realize those words weren’t really meant for you.

They were for me—

for the girl who felt everything too deeply,

who loved too quickly,

who was learning the hard way

that sometimes the heart breaks before it ever gets touched.

She deserved to be heard.

She deserved to be held.

She deserved someone who saw her

the way she was trying so hard to see you.

And maybe that’s why I keep returning to those pages—

not to remember you,

but to remember her

and everything she never said

but felt so fiercely it shaped the woman I became.