TIMELESS REFLECTIONS BY ZOEY

Some questions stay with me not because they are complicated, but because the only person who could answer them chooses not to. So, I carry them. I breathe through them. And every now and then, I let them out through words, hoping someone, somewhere, is sitting with the same ache.

Do people ever regret leaving someone who loved them fully, completely, and without condition?

I am not speaking of love shown on birthdays or celebrated during anniversaries. I mean the love found in everyday gestures the kind that shows up in silence, in patience, in second chances. The love that stays, forgives, hopes, and chooses again, even when disappointment has made it easier to walk away. The kind of love that weaves itself into a person’s being. Quiet, steady, and real.

And still… they leave.

What I struggle to understand is when the one who leaves is someone who claims to believe in love. Someone who tears up during romantic movies. Someone who cheers for couples in stories where love endures despite the odds. Someone who watches One Tree Hill, Little Things, Friends. Stories  where love is not perfect, but it is fought for.

How does someone like that treat real love living, breathing, deeply rooted love as if it were replaceable?

It unsettles me. Because the concept of love was not unfamiliar to them. 

They admired it, even yearned for it. But when it was given to them without performance, without artifice they turned away. As though the fictional version felt safer than the reality that slept beside them.

And what haunts me most is this:

Even when a child is born from that love… a child who carries the warmth and the history of all they once shared… they still leave.

Do they not feel the absence of their own blood?

Do they not lie awake at times and hear the silence where laughter used to be? Do they not miss the weight of small arms around their neck, or the bedtime stories they will never hear?

And if they do feel the loss of that child, how do they separate her from the person who carried her? The one who stayed. The one who gave everything to love both of them.

Because that child was not created in isolation. She was born from shared moments soft, uncertain, human. 

She exists because two people once dared to believe in a future together. So how does one claim the child but discard the love that made her possible?

You cannot love a part and deny the whole.

She is not just a child. She is memory. She is lineage. Her eyes, her laugh, her voice all carry pieces of a love that once was. Holding her means holding the past. It means remembering that once, you were loved without condition.

And maybe that is what breaks me.

I loved you the way you said love should look. Not with spectacle, but with soul. I gave you the very kind of love you claimed to admire in others. And still, you left without warning, without turning the last page.

So I ask again, not just for myself, but for everyone who has been left behind, holding questions instead of closure:

Do they ever regret walking away from those who loved them with everything they had?

Or are some hearts simply unable to recognize what they once swore they were searching for?

Perhaps the silence is already an answer.

And perhaps, someday, that is what they will regret most of all.

You do not walk away from someone willing to carry your pain at least not without leaving a part of yourself behind.