i hate him

I hate him.

At least, that is what I keep telling myself — like a mantra I hope will one day become true.

Because my worst nightmare has unfolded in the quietest, most irreversible way possible.

He started dating.

There was no dramatic confrontation, no cinematic ending to my silent devotion. Just a subtle shift in reality — and suddenly he was standing beside someone else, smiling in a way I once memorized, holding a hand I once imagined would be mine.

I did not anticipate the violence of this ache.

It is not loud. It does not scream. It suffocates.

I feel breathless in the most literal sense. As though the air around me has thinned. Sleep has abandoned me; nights stretch endlessly, and when I finally drift into unconsciousness, I wake up hollow — suspended in a strange limbo between numbness and unbearable awareness.

Seeing them together ignites something visceral inside me. My heart doesn’t just ache — it burns. It burns when he stands too close to her. It burns when he laughs with her. It burns when he looks at her in ways I once imagined he might look at me.

And yet, in a twist that feels almost cruel, I still wish him happiness. Even when that happiness excludes me. Even when it demands my own unraveling.

In an attempt to escape myself, I drank for the first time.

I thought intoxication would blur his face, mute his voice, soften the edges of memory. I believed I could drown his name in alcohol.

Instead, I cried.

I called out for him — helplessly, shamelessly.

I was incoherent, fragile, humiliatingly exposed. I threw up. I collapsed into a version of myself I did not recognize. And somewhere between tears and nausea, I heard my own voice ask a question that still echoes:

“Am I that ugly?”

I do not know why that was the wound my mind chose to press.

Perhaps because when someone chooses another, the rejection feels anatomical — as though something in you was insufficient. As though love were a competition you unknowingly lost.

And then fate — with its impeccable cruelty — intervened.

For two years, I had wished we would land in the same organizing committee category. Two years of quiet hope. Two years of imagining proximity as destiny.

And when it finally happened, it happened after he had already chosen someone else.

The irony feels deliberate.

Our first OC party was at a club — loud, dimly lit, disorienting. He was heavily intoxicated. Too close. Close enough that people mistook our proximity for something real. For a fleeting second, it felt like I had stepped into the alternate universe I had once prayed for.

Then reality intruded again.

He leaned in carelessly. His hand drifted near my cleavage — not intentionally, not consciously, merely the recklessness of alcohol.

But something inside me fractured. I snapped his hand away with such force that it left a cut. The mark still lingers on his skin. And that mark lingers on my conscience. Because I did not mean to hurt him.

But in that moment, all I could think was: He is dating someone.

The thought made my body recoil. It made proximity feel wrong, almost illicit. It ignited anger that was not truly directed at him — but at the unbearable contradiction of wanting him while knowing I could not have him.

Now I see him almost daily.

We converse as though nothing has shifted. We perform normalcy with practiced ease.

But I notice everything.

The way he hugs her — protective, instinctive. The way he urges her to eat when she refuses. The way he gently wipes something from her lips.

I avert my gaze.

And every time I do, something within me splinters.

It is a quiet destruction. The kind that makes no sound. The kind that no one notices because it is hidden beneath composure and politeness.

I once believed I was stronger than this.

I had already survived a love that turned into a nightmare. I had told myself that if I ever allowed my heart to try again, I would be wiser. Guarded. Rational.

I was wrong.

The girl who prided herself on practicality — the one her parents trusted, the one who always held herself together — has dissolved into someone unrecognizable.

She does not collapse publicly. She does not beg for comfort. She simply disintegrates privately.

And perhaps that is worse.

Because how do you seek consolation for a heartbreak that was never official? How do you grieve something that existed only in silence?

So I say I hate him.

But the truth is more complex.

I do not hate him.

I hate the helplessness. I hate the way my heart continues to choose him against all logic. I hate that loving him has reduced me to questioning my worth. I hate that I must witness the tenderness I once dreamed of — given to someone else.

Most of all, I hate the version of myself that still hopes — irrationally, desperately — even when reality has already spoken.

I hate that I cannot stop loving him.

I hate that even after everything, even after watching him build something with someone else, my heart still chooses him.

And the worst part is, I cannot say any of this to anyone.

I cannot.

I swallow it. I carry it. I live with it.

But one thing remains painfully, helplessly true —

I still love him.

Even now.

And I hate myself immensely for it.