I think I’m an “Adult” now.

There’s a gnawing hole in my heart, one unlike the sinking feeling of the loss of a relationship. At 14, “dating” someone was a cool thing to do, it became a symbol of status, when all we really did was have mild infatuations. Five years and several tumultuous relationships later, I stand here, almost given up and disillusioned by the idea of love. My mind’s in a place where friendships that I nurtured have much more meaning than any other relationship I aspire to have. I have seen new love blossom around me one too many times, and I’ve always been happy about it. But this time, that was not the case.

Maybe, the charm of love wore off, and everything it read felt dirty, the cheesiness burning through the screen that I thought was once adorable, now reminded me of painful memories. Someone came up to me and opened up about being interested in someone, but rather, the feeling of being interested in someone. Butterflies now remind of me the tears I once shed, when the world experience tingles when they have butterflies, I have dread.

I’m sure I sound like a bitter bitch riding off a break-up high, wanting to bash every relationship in existence, but I don’t think that’s the case. I think I’ve grown older, or the become the very thing I didn’t want to be, an ‘adult’. Miss me with the cutesy stuff, miss me with the cheese; companionship in regular thoughts is the true ride, and I see a friend have it, and I’ve never been more happier for someone else.

My friend’s joke that I attracted baggage — that my personality was of a flirtatious, frivolous guy who tends to fall for people who are problematic. There’s some truth to it, I’ve realised that when broken people open up, it creates an air of intimacy that seems so surreal, that you fall for that, without knowing what’s in it. But, being constantly around baggage led me to a point where now I’ve become a porter for it, carrying weight I don’t want to.

Six months of having to spend time with my thoughts, while simultaneously having multiple things go wrong has altered my perception of a lot of things, and one of it happens to be the rejection of the romanticisation of love from my system. There’s a very cheesy saying which goes along the lines of ‘you find love when you’re least expecting it’. In today’s world of social media and dating apps, where you have to ‘put yourself out’, it sounded like a phrase of the past. But today, after knowing that I’ve managed to close off every “modern” way of finding love with huge locks of trauma, I just have to let go of the idea that the emptiness in my heart needs to be filled by someone and when things have to happen, they will happen. Until then, I’ll just be on about annoying my friends with random videos from the Internet.