Trigger warning: This story holds reflections on love, loss, and learning, woven together with moments of pain, including sexual assault and trauma. Please read with care.
To enter the love battlefield is a risk; either it all works out the way it should or it does not, and that’s the gamble you take going in. To love is to take a risk, to walk willingly into something that might either build you up or break you down. Love has always been a battlefield I didn’t know how to fight on. For the first time in my life, love is a quiet, peaceful place to rest. But it wasn’t always like that.
I have spent so much of my life convincing myself that love was meant to be chaotic, that pain was the necessary price to pay for that level of closeness love brings. I mistook inconsistency for excitement and suffering as a testament to my resilience. I know I’m not the only one who did so.
But I see it all so clearly now. And so, here is what I have to say to all the boys I’ve done before — words I have never said out loud but ones that deserve to be heard. Loosely inspired by the movie “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before,” where the main character writes unsent letters to everybody she has ever loved, but in my version, they are not letters of love, but those of truth.
Writing these letters has been cathartic in the sense that it helped release the weight I’ve been carrying for far too long, as well as the love and loss I’ve never spoken about out loud. If you’ve ever felt silenced, confused or been changed by the people you once gave pieces of yourself to, I hope this inspires you to write your own version and serves as a form of empowerment.
Ryan,
You were my first, my first everything, and I wish I could say that means something good, but it doesn’t. I will hate you for ruining me when I was just a girl. You took something from me before I knew how to give it, before I even knew what it meant.
I will forever feel that October buried deep inside me, and its hand wrapped tightly around my throat. Those memories didn’t simply fade, they shape the way I move through the world, the way I flinch at unexpected touches, the way I hesitate.
Your body is not merely a temple, it is a kingdom. If someone enters without your permission, you can declare war. But I didn’t know that then. I only knew how to survive, not how to fight.
Ryan, thank you for nothing.
Shaan,
We were no-strings-attached, and for an excruciatingly long amount of time. You came and went as you pleased, and I mistook that for freedom and control — something I had previously lost.
You were the classic situationship, one with no roots and no expectations, so clearly no future. To you, I was a good time, but not one that needed to be acknowledged in the daylight. There is something so uniquely cruel about only being wanted in whispers and not in certainty. We sounded more beautiful in my head than we ever were in reality.
I turned from a girl who used to believe in romance but settled for being someone’s passing amusement, for the first and last time in my life. From you, I didn’t learn anything about what love is, but I did learn what it wasn’t.
Shaan, thank you for letting me go (aka ghosting me after one year on-and-off) because I don’t think I had the heart to let you go and walk away.
Rishi,
My beautiful, wonderful, gentle boyfriend, who for the first time I am learning what it means to be wanted in return. You are the first person I have wanted, and not simply accepted and gone along with because I thought I had to. You are the first one to hold me without hurting me, the first one whose touch does not come with any conditions or demands.
From all the guys before, my body is still learning and unlearning. Sex was never a choice before, and now that it is, my body hesitates and my mind tenses. The past still lingers in the spaces between us, as I flinch only to realize that there is no reason to anymore. You never rush me, you never demand more than I can give. You wait, understand and sympathize.
The universe sometimes does work in my favor after all, because I get to spend it with you and get the chance to know you. So, if it’s not you, it’s no one. You are everything I have dreamed of in a partner and best friend since I was a little girl. You are the greatest being I have ever experienced.
I have spent years not knowing that men can be capable of being kind to me. But you are proof that love is not meant to be something we suffer through. It is not a battle, not a war zone. It is a place to rest, a place to belong.
Rishi, thank you for showing me how to do things from love and not for love.
Putting these feelings into words makes the memories that were once heavy feel lighter. These letters give shape to the feelings I did not know how to name at the time: grief, confusion, hope and finally peace. In writing this, I’ve let go of things I didn’t know I was still carrying. Here I am, laying myself bare, with the full intent of doing so.
To all the boys I’ve done before, thank you for shaping me, for better or for worse.