I recently saw a note on Substack that, at first glance, I was insanely drawn to, almost magnetized by it, because unfortunately I still deeply resonate with those love-bombing, overwhelmingly intense, all-consuming emotions that sweep you off your feet and make everything feel electric and fated and larger than life — but within moments it shifted, it turned into a suffocating, constricting sensation and tight in my chest.
This was it from Ankur Singh:
“I will burn all the bridges that lead me away from the people I love.”
This is truly beautiful, and I wish my naive self could still agree. But you can only think this way until you’ve faced your loved ones with cold, dark eyes from cruelty, or until your favorite person standing in front of you as an enemy.
If you ever have to run from those you love, it’s already painful enough. Keep a few bridges that lead away just for the view, so you don’t have to leap into the void when you need to escape—swimming in darkness, suffocation, exhaustion, and heartbreak. Keep some bridges, for they are your safety, and I hope you never have to use them.
When the harshest blows come from the very person who once nurtured you tenderly, and the one who crushes your future is the same one who entrusted you with the keys to it – that’s when your entire life flashes before your eyes, like a movie playing too quickly to understand.
When you realize that what you believed was love was just a calculated lie, moving on can feel surprisingly simple — because all memories fade, and every shared moment seems to collapse into unreality. Since it was never truly what you thought, it almost feels as if it never really happened.
The true challenge lies in what you do afterward. How can you dare to love again after experiencing betrayal—especially betrayal that cruel that it fundamentally changes your nervous system?
No matter how much healing you achieve, how many therapy sessions you attend, how many insights you gain, or how many layers you peel away, something will never quite be the same again. The strange part is that you don’t even want it to be the same, because if this could really happen — and it could happen to you, not just in movies or to others, but to you — then it’s better to know, better to be prepared, better to avoid walking in blind.
And so, you become someone who, whenever she enters a room alone with a man, instinctively scans the space, notes where the door is, and calculates how many seconds it would take to reach it from any corner of the apartment. You become someone whose body launches into a brutal panic when someone gets upset with her, yet she sits through the entire scene as if nothing is happening — as if every muscle in her body weren’t coiled and ready to run, racing through contingencies and calculating whether there’s enough time to grab her laptop if she needs to run.
She does this because she doesn’t want to look completely ridiculous if the guy turns out to be cute, and she certainly doesn’t want her fear to trigger an even stronger reaction in the other person if he turns out not to be cute — so she just sits there and smiles, hopes for the best but stays hyper-aware, so alert that she could leap up in a fraction of a second if needed.
You become the person who carries, forever, a hunted animal somewhere deep inside her soul — and who eventually finds peace with that, because even being a hunted animal feels safer than ever being a naive little girl.
Because I have always imagined my life through the frame of marriage — to me, it has always represented the deepest, most sacred covenant, the moment when you intentionally choose one another as family — I decided that I owe it to myself to give this dream a real chance to still become reality.
Clearly, for that to occur, I need to meet someone, date, and genuinely get to know another person — as deeply as one human can know another. Despite my secret wish to effortlessly slip into a happy, stable, long-term relationship without the awkward stages in between, haha.
The truth is, meeting, trusting, and discovering who someone truly is can only happen if I am willing to keep extending trust—again and again, as many times as needed. So, if I genuinely want this, I have no choice but to act and keep going, even when I am scared.
It’s similar to how I approach my PhD — a promise I made to myself. It won’t interfere with my work, fatigue, exhaustion, moods, or whatever chaos is happening in my life. I’ll work on it at night if I have to, during the day if I must, tired, sick, alongside double shifts — it doesn’t matter. I’ll do it no matter what it costs. Obsessively, if necessary.
And that’s how I am with love. Because I genuinely want it, I keep trying. I try even when a flashback suddenly overtakes me. I try when I feel ashamed that my nights are filled with nightmares. I try when I get scared. I try even in those moments when terror surges through me, and I feel the urge to run — because I want the damage to be only as large as it absolutely needs to be. I want only what is truly irreplaceable to be lost, and I want anything that still has the potential to be good to have a chance.
I want my past experiences to enrich and teach me, making me wiser, but not to define me or limit my future. I refuse to let the fear of history repeating itself steal my possibilities.
I want my broken heart, now that it’s fused back together, to be stronger — and, because of that strength, capable of loving even more fiercely than before.
In summary, I will never again, under any circumstances, burn all the bridges leading away from those I cherish; however, I want to be able to completely forget that they still exist. (I mean the bridges, not the people I love. I definitely want to remember the people I love.)
I openly admit that I feel awkward sharing my poetry, even though I easily show you my blunt, raw prose. That’s precisely why, like all my other poems (including all three previous pieces, ha!), this one will also be behind a paywall on Substack, because there are so few of you there —and that makes it feel safer.
The topic is, I think, basically the same I have just talked about, but as you’ve told me, with many readings come many meanings, so I guess it doesn’t matter.
Enjoy—or don’t—but let me know either way.
Much love to all of you. I truly feel your support and love. My usual love bubbles are already on their way to you.
