loving is a choice.

Even if it feels like fate itself tied the knot there are still moments when we clash, disagree, or just don't understand each other. I used to think love was about how you feel, but now I see it's also a choice one we make over and over again, even when things get messy.

Maybe that's why it scares me. Because I've built this little space in my heart where you're the only thing that makes sense. It's comforting, but also terrifying, to depend on something so fragile, so human.

There are moments when I think I've figured it out, when I feel a spark of clarity, but then it fades, and I'm back to wondering what any of this really means.

It's strange, how life can look fine from the outside while inside, everything feels out of place. I keep asking myself if this is what growing up feels like- constantly questioning your choices, your worth, your direction. I try to be grateful, to remind myself that I'm still here, still breathing, but even that sometimes feels like a small victory I can barely claim.

and when i pause to think for a moment, all these issues, they all boil down to one thing. my mother.

I don't know how to love right. Sometimes I catch myself pulling away from people who care, and I hate it but it feels safer that way. Maybe it's because the first person who was supposed to love me didn't know how to stay.

My mom was there, but not really. I used to watch her and wonder what I did wrong, why her love always felt like something I had to earn.

Now I see bits of her in myself. The cold tone. The sudden distance. The need to control everything just to avoid feeling abandoned again. It's like she passed down her wounds instead of her warmth. And I'm still trying to unlearn it.

Sometimes I imagine what it would be like if she came back, if we sat down and talked not as mother and child, but as two people who hurt each other without meaning to. I do not know if I could forgive her completely, but I think I would try.

I still carry her absence like an old scar. Some days, I trace it and feel nothing. Other days, it aches like it just happened. She is still my mother. She is still the woman who left, and the woman I will keep trying to forgive.