The Hollow Heart

A love story

The Hollow Heart

I fell into a love so vast,
A sea of dreams too bright, too fast.
Its waves were soft, its pull so strong,
I didn’t see where I went wrong.

Your voice became my only song,
I sang it loud, I sang it long.
But piece by piece, I disappeared,
My edges blurred, my thoughts unclear.

I gave my light, I gave my soul,
Yet found within a gaping hole.
A love that promised boundless skies
Became a void where daylight dies.

I see now what I couldn’t then,
The loss of self, the bitter end.
For love that asks the self to fade,
Leaves shadows where the heart once stayed.

Now in the quiet, I rebuild,
The empty spaces gently filled.
For love that grows must never be
A prison cloaked in mystery.

Buy Me A Coffee

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I’ve been sitting with the loss of Aaron in a way that feels quieter now, but somehow deeper.

At first, it was loud—grief usually is. It crashes in, demands to be felt, takes up all the space in the room. But this… this is different. This is what’s left after the noise fades. The stillness where you begin to see things as they were, not just as you hoped they were.

I keep coming back to how fully I gave myself.

Not reluctantly. Not halfway. I stepped into that love like it was something sacred, something meant to hold me as much as I held it. And for a while, it felt like it did. There was warmth, connection, a sense of being seen. Or at least, I believed I was seen.

But somewhere along the way, I started to disappear.

It wasn’t sudden. It never is. It was small things at first—adjusting, softening, bending in ways that didn’t feel like sacrifice at the time. It felt like love. Like devotion. Like choosing “us” over “me.” And I didn’t question it, because it felt beautiful to give that deeply.

Until I realized I had given so much that I couldn’t find myself anymore.

That’s the part that aches now—not just losing him, but losing the version of me that slowly faded while I was trying to hold something together that couldn’t hold me back. There’s a kind of grief in that that’s hard to name. It’s not just heartbreak. It’s recognition.

I see now what I couldn’t see then.

Love, real love, isn’t supposed to ask you to become smaller to keep it alive. It isn’t supposed to blur your edges until you’re unrecognizable, even to yourself. And yet, I let that happen. Not because I’m weak—but because I believed in something I thought was worth it.

There’s no shame in that. I’m trying to let that be true.

Still, there’s an emptiness where that love used to live. A hollow kind of quiet. Not the sharp pain from before, but something more spacious, more echoing. Like a room that’s been cleared out after being too full for too long.

And in that space… I’m starting to rebuild.

Gently. Slowly. Without rushing to fill it with something new just to avoid feeling it. I’m learning what it means to come back to myself—to notice my own thoughts again, my own preferences, my own voice that isn’t shaped around someone else’s presence.

It’s strange, how unfamiliar that can feel at first.

But there’s also something sacred in it.

Because this time, I’m not building a love that requires me to disappear. I’m building something steadier inside myself—something rooted, something honest. A kind of love that doesn’t demand I trade pieces of who I am just to keep it from breaking.

Aaron is gone. That chapter is closed, whether I was ready for it or not.

But I’m still here.

And maybe that’s the quiet miracle in all of this—not that I loved and lost, but that I can see clearly now what love should not cost me.

I didn’t lose everything.

I lost something that couldn’t last in the form I was holding it.

And now, in this quiet, I’m learning how to hold myself again—

without disappearing,

without dimming,

without leaving pieces of me behind

just to be loved.