Love played football,
knees always bruised,
voice always loud enough to lead.
Captain of a team,
captain of rooms,
captain of attention.
Final year confidence sat on him
like it had always belonged there.
And I, a fresher,
still learning which corridors echoed,
still learning how to take up space
without apologising.
How cool is that? I thought.
How cinematic.
This time, I thought,
I know what love is.
It feels familiar—like a song I half-remember
but swear I've always known the words to.
This time,
Love lived two hundred metres away.
Close enough to count steps,
far enough to feel destined.
We went on evening walks
where the sky softened on cue,
where silence felt like agreement.
We took the same bus to college—
shoulders brushing like accidents.
Love had a best friend. Everyone knew that.
The best friend laughed too loud,
waited too long,
knew Love's schedule better than Love did.
She was clingy.
Annoying.
Always there.
"This is normal," Love said
without saying it.
And I believed him
because belief is easier
than suspicion when you're sixteen.
Love texted in fragments,
met in stolen pockets of time,
held my hand like it was temporary.
A month passed
like a borrowed jacket—
warm, familiar,
never quite mine.
Then the air changed.
Truth has a way of arriving
without knocking.
Whispers turned solid.
Names gained weight.
The best friend stopped being a background character
and became the plot.
Turns out,
Love had always belonged to someone else.
A second-year certainty
I was never warned about.
And suddenly,
I wasn't the girl who walked home at dusk.
I was the girl who seduced.
The girl who stole.
The girl who ruined something sacred.
And that felt familiar.
Hadn't I JUST gotten over being the girl who always STEALS?
But this time,
I stayed silent.
Funny how silence rewrites you.
She realised the truth before I did—
that I wasn't a villain,
just uninformed.
That Love was fluent in omission,
that he let us collide
and watched the damage unfold.
Love didn't shatter loudly.
He just stepped back,
hands clean,
while we were left explaining ourselves
to the same world.
And that's when I learned—
love doesn't always leave bruises.
Sometimes it leaves confusion.
Sometimes it teaches you
that being chosen
isn't the same as being respected.
Love arrived at sixteen,
but honesty didn't come with him.
And maybe that's what growing up is—
realising that some loves are lessons,
some metaphors bleed,
and some captains
were never steering the ship at all.