A Love that missed its time

She never meant to fall for him.
Not like this.

Not when she hadn’t fully healed, not with this reckless pull that made her heart behave like a wound pressed under warm hands. But it happened anyway, slowly at first, through messages, through confessions, through long nights when his breathing on the other side of the phone felt closer than her own, and then all at once, the day he looked at her with those too-young eyes and asked, very quietly, very clearly,

“Will you marry me?”

He meant it.
He wasn’t playing or dramatizing, wasn’t trying on the word the way some people do.
He said it like someone clutching the only anchor in the middle of a storm.

And for a second, she saw it…
saw a life with him, imagined mornings that didn’t hurt, and evenings that didn’t crumble upon you. Him sitting across from her at the table, destiny smiling upon them with honest pleasure. For one wild moment, every shattered thing inside her reached for him, wanting to whisper Yes.

But her lips said No.

No, because his life hadn’t even opened fully yet and hers had already been torn apart and patched back together with trembling fingers and because she had walked too far into the desert of her years to pretend, she could become a shore for his young ocean..
Because a love like this, between someone almost burnt and someone just learning how to catch fire, always demands more than it gives.

He didn’t understand.
How could he?
He was still standing at the beginning of his road. Still trying to find his way in the world.

He asked why.
She said something about it not being possible, about the world, about circumstances, things that sounded practical, the age gap between them. What she didn’t tell him was that their differences were a wide canyon and she refused to let him jump. She would let him live at the cost of her demise…

Days passed.
They went back to their strange orbit, him circling her with texts and calls and confessions; her pretending her refusal hadn’t broken her own heart.

And then, one evening, in an emotional moment, he confessed

“You took me out of the ocean I was drowning in, turned yourself into a boat. I was lost and you held my hand, guided me to the shore… It’s because of you that I feel alive again,”

“So did you…” she said.

‘It is a story written in sand, destined to be washed away by the next wave,’ she thought but didn’t utter these words.

“I might get married someday, you know…” he said, “and I want you to be there that day,”

He didn’t even look at her when he said it., But she knew why he did…
He just let the sentence stay between them like it meant nothing.

She felt the ground tilt.

It was the most ordinary line in the world, and yet it cut through her like a knife dipped in all her old fears. Because suddenly she saw it, saw him standing next to someone closer to his age, someone who would grow old with him instead before him, someone whose body didn’t carry the marks of grief the way hers did. And in that instant, she realized just how much she loved him, how deeply she had let him seep into the cracks of her broken heart.

That night, desperation knocked louder than dignity.

“Promise me something,” she implored.

He looked at her. “Anything.”

“Don’t marry,” she whispered. “Not anyone. Not ever.”

He didn’t even pause.
“Okay,” he said, like it was the easiest thing in the world. “I won’t. I’ll stay.”

And that’s when the real terror began.

Because she had asked for something she had no right to ask. And he had given her something he had no idea he was sacrificing.
Because she had turned into a lighthouse in the middle of a desert, bright, but useless, pulling him toward her and away from every real shore his life could lead him to.

He stayed.
He chose her.
At least, that’s what he believed he was doing.

She began to come apart.

The first time he reached out to hug her after that, she pushed him away. Too quickly. Too sharply. It hurt him more than she knew. He thought it was rejection, thought she saw him as not good enough, not man enough, not worthy. He didn’t know she stepped back because the fiery, uncontrollable intensity with which she wanted to melt into his arms terrified her. She knew if she let herself feel him, really feel him, she would never find the strength to untangle her fingers from his shirt.

She tried to retreat. Tried to become only a voice, only a friend, only a presence that didn’t ache. But desire doesn’t care about your logic. It finds a way to erupt.

One evening, when the silence between them felt like the winter fog, the words spilled out before she could pull them back.

“Kiss me,” she said.

He stared at her, stunned. “What?”

“Just once,” she breathed, hating herself for wanting it, needing it.

He moved toward her like someone stepping into deep water, cautious, frightened, but compelled. When his hands cupped her face, she felt the years between them screaming, but her body refused to listen. His lips brushed hers once, soft, stunned, and she inhaled like she had been underwater her entire life.

When he kissed her fully, it was clumsy and trembling and holy.

Inside that kiss, she felt everything she had been running from: the earthquake that had destroyed the building called her, the emptiness she carried like a second spine, the way her love had always been too much for the men who tried to hold it. She tasted his youth, his rawness, his belief that this kiss meant something they could one day build on, and all she could think was:

I am empty.
I am vacant.
I have nothing inside me anymore.
My love will not lift you; it will chain you.

He had no idea.
To him, she was the woman he chose, the woman he had waited for, the woman he would never leave.

To her, he was an island in the tumultuous ocean of her life, beautiful, untouched, but not meant for her tired body to rest on. He was like drizzle in a land that had been barren for centuries. He was a boat that had stopped by her by destiny, not design, and she knew if she tied him to her shore, she would ruin him.

Her thoughts spiralled faster than his heartbeat.

Where does a woman past her prime fit in his life?
Where does quicksand hold the power to grow rose shrubs?
Where do raindrops fall when the earth has forgotten how to receive them?

His lips were warm. Hers remembered warmth but did not trust it anymore.

You can kiss a corpse, she thought bitterly, but you won’t feel anything in it come alive.

He pulled her closer.
She let him, for one impossible, perfect, devastating moment. She let herself believe there was still something inside her that wasn’t rubble.

Then she pulled away, breathless, shaking, wanting to explain and completely unable to.

He didn’t understand the way her eyes looked at him; with yearning, hope, love and regret all at the same time. He thought it was simple. He thought love, once confessed and tasted, would finally be allowed to stay.

He didn’t know she was already making up her mind to leave.

Because she knew something he didn’t: that she would not survive chaining him to her.
And he would not survive being chained. She saw a future his young eyes couldn’t see..

She remembered how she once loved a man so fiercely she almost drowned him in it.
That man died with her name still haunting her bones.
She would not stand in that kind of shadow again.

She wanted to plant roses for this boy, she really did, to turn the quicksand of her life into something that could hold beauty, just once. But her hands were numb, her fingers twisted by all the years that had come before him, and she didn’t own a shovel. You can’t grow gardens in ground that has forgotten softness.

She was a torn book.
He was fresh ink.
She could not let him write his youth on her crumpled pages.

So, she did the only thing that made sense in a life that had never made sense:
she chose to disappear.

Not right away.
Not dramatically.
Not with a speech or a scene.
But slowly, deliberately, with the kind of quiet cruelty only self-preservation and love combined can produce.

She messaged him less.Called less.
She let the hours stretch longer between replies.
He noticed.
Of course he noticed.
He asked what was wrong; she said nothing. He tried to hold on tighter; she tried to make herself harder to hold.

And beneath it all, the monologue kept burning:

I waited for you for twenty-five years.
Now that you’re here, I don’t know what to do with these feelings that come like aftershocks.
I’ve been through an earthquake and it destroyed the building called me.
I am empty. Vacant.
My love will not be enough for you; it will chain you.
I cannot sacrifice your youth upon the altar of my dwindling life.
My end cannot be your beginning.
My love is a broken mirror; you will never see yourself clearly in it.
I took a dive knowing I didn’t know how to swim, and now I’m drowning without a boat, without a life jacket but before I go under, I want you to know I cared for you like no one would, like no one could.
But this love story is twenty-five years late.
I wished I could change something, plant new roses, turn this desolation into a garden, but my hands are numb, my fingers twisted, and I don’t own a shovel.
I hugged you once and felt like I owned the world, and when I went home and looked at myself in the mirror, I wanted to dissolve…but kiss me once so I carry your memory on my lips.
Make me forget to breathe once so I can die in peace, holding you like a sacred book in my hands, in my heart, in my soul.

She had asked for that kiss.
He had given it.
That was all she would take.

And then one day, she was just… gone.

There was no dramatic breakup, no final confession, but absence, deleted chats and silence where there had once been late-night calls and trembling, half-laughing, half-crying conversations about pain and fear and tomorrow.

He tried to reach her. He tried to understand.
He blamed himself, blamed his words, blamed his line about maybe getting married someday, blamed his youth, blamed his timing. He never realised she left not because he wasn’t enough, but because he was too much of everything she had once begged the universe for, and she refused to be the reason his stars would never find their own galaxy.

If anyone had asked her, years later, why she left the way she did, why did she tear herself away from the only warmth she had known in decades, she would have said:

“I pulled him into the boat because he was drowning.
I jumped out because I could not let him drown with me…”

Some loves are not wrong; they’re just tragically misplaced in time. And theirs was exactly that, a fierce, impossible lighthouse rising alone in the middle of a desert, shining bright for a ship that was never meant to anchor there forever.

THE END