The Ruin Script

the last time we met, everything felt so genuine that i almost failed to notice the distance quietly sitting between us. the shared table, the drinks, the food—everything tasted so warm that i nearly convinced myself this must be what “us” would have felt like if we ever allowed it to become something real. the laughter, the smiles, the stories you forgot you had already told me before. but instead of stopping you, i kept listening as though it was still the first time you told me so.

but even then, there was never really a definition between us.

i was never yours, and you were never mine. we were not friends either. a lover would be too much. companion? perhaps. two souls trying to understand why we kept finding our way back to each other despite not knowing what to call it.

i never tried to define us because defining something means acknowledging its existence. and acknowledging it meant risking the walls i spent years building around myself. not because i did not trust you, but because i was terrified of what would happen if i finally let someone reach the parts of me i kept hidden for so long.

if i gave it a chance,
would it survive all the questions inside me?
would it become the kind of love i imagined?
would it work despite all these uncertainties?

i was afraid the answer would be no.

but if i am being honest, you were the person who made surrender feel less like imprisonment and more like rest. i allowed my silence to soften around you. i allowed my guarded nature to loosen in ways i never admitted out loud. i let my independence sit beside yours without feeling threatened by it.

i let my vulnerability memorize your comfort.
your softness. your care. because with you,
vulnerability almost felt safe.

that was my language.
silent. careful. unspoken.

i never knew how to say it loudly the way you did.

while you offered your affection openly, i loved through presence. through listening. through staying. through memorizing the smallest things about you no one else noticed. through allowing you into spaces within me no one else ever reached. i thought maybe, if i stayed long enough, you would eventually understand that silence can also mean devotion.

but somewhere along the way,
we misunderstood the forms we were given.

you saw my silence as distance when it was actually trust trying to learn how to exist beside someone. and i mistook your loudness for certainty, believing that if your love was real, then surely it would know how to reach me without me needing to ask.

and that was when i realized:
we never truly understood each other.

and that is where we slowly began losing each other.

the first time you said “i love you,” it felt like i needed to decipher its meaning before i could understand it. i remember trying to understand what those words truly meant coming from you. not because i doubted you, but because love has always been something i needed to understand deeply before i could hold it with my own hands.

on your end, it was your way of conveying what you felt towards me. and perhaps you already expected that i would laugh it out—and i did. not because it was meaningless, but because it felt unfamiliar. too exposed for someone like me who spent years surviving through silence. i did not know what to do with something i had never learned how to receive properly.

you never introduced me to what your “love” truly meant.

i understand the meaning of “i love you” the way everyone else does. but love changes depending on the person carrying it. and i needed to know yours. i needed to understand how it breathes, how it stays, how it aches, how it yearns, how it chooses.

because when you said it, it felt like water slipping through my hands.
something i could touch, but never fully hold.

so i searched for it.
its purpose. its sincerity. its meaning.

i searched through your kindness, your comfort, your patience, the safety you tried to offer me. i searched through your actions, hoping one day your love would become clearer to me. but the more i searched alone, the darker it became, as though i was blinding myself trying to force meaning out of something i was too afraid to ask directly.

maybe i was searching the wrong way.
maybe love was never meant to be solved alone.
maybe the answer only existed within you.

that is why i searched for it in your eyes.
and you know what i found?

walls.

not walls as tall as mine, but walls nonetheless. enough to keep me from fully knowing you. enough to stop me from understanding the language you were trying to speak. the kind that allowed me to stand near them, but never close enough to understand what was hidden behind them.

and i tried convincing myself there must have been a reason for it. maybe you were waiting for certainty from me. maybe you needed reassurance before lowering your own guard. maybe you were only protecting yourself from my uncertainty the same way i was protecting myself from yours.

and maybe neither of us were wrong for that.

but instead of knocking on your walls, i stepped back from them. because your castle no longer felt like an invitation of love. it felt like something only you knew how to enter.

maybe that is the main reason why i could never fully offer what i should have offered you. because while you were waiting for me to say the words, i was waiting for us to understand them first.

i never wanted you to climb my walls nor shatter them just to enter my world. i was already willing to open the door for you myself. slowly. intentionally. despite the unfamiliarity of it all, i genuinely believed maybe we could figure it out together.

i was already there.

waiting for you to call my name like a sacred vow only we understood. like fragile glass that would shatter if mishandled. i was waiting not only for you, but for myself too. waiting for the moment i could finally say “i love you” in a language both of us could understand.

because i did love you.

in my own ways. in my own silence.
in all the ways i did not know how to translate properly.

but before i could finally learn how to say it properly, everything collapsed beneath misunderstanding. like words written in pencil, we disappeared from each other little by little until there was nothing left to read.

and it hurts.

not the kind of pain caused by betrayal or hatred, but the kind created when two people genuinely try to love each other and still fail to meet halfway.

because the truth is,
we both loved each other.

we simply loved each other’s reflection of love. we both craved the kind of love we naturally give that we forgot to recognize the love we were already receiving.

you loved me so loudly,
that you never heard my silence.

and i loved you in silence,
that i became deafened by your noise.

we kept searching for our own reflection inside each other’s love instead of learning the shape of the love we were actually being given. and maybe that is the lesson this leaves behind. the lesson we should carry moving forward.

that love is not a reflection of what we expect to receive, but something we should learn to define, understand, and accept despite its unfamiliarity.

that lack of communication slowly ruins connection.
that definition matters when trying to familiarize the unknown.
that love is not only bound by mutual feeling, but by mutual understanding.

that love can be expressed so loudly,
and sometimes, so silently that it gets mistaken for absence.

i think that was us in the end.

two people speaking the same language,
but never truly learning how to understand each other.

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author’s note:
— bled by @achilleusdeirdre
— 21st of may, year 2026
— open to criticism; all echoes welcome.
— lowercase intended for signature writing.