depending

I carry my own bags. I solve my own problems. I sit with my own pain until it becomes quiet enough to live within. Depending on people has always felt dangerous because I’ve learned that anything I lean on can disappear. So I become my own home, my own safety net, my own certainty.

But then I fall in love.

And somehow, without realizing it, I begin building my life around one person.

My mornings start with wondering if they’ve texted. My happiest moments become the ones I know I’ll tell them about later. I save songs because they’ll like them. I notice little things because I can’t wait to hear their laugh when I mention them. Every plan I make quietly leaves room for them. Every future I imagine accidentally has their name written into it.

I hate that.

Not because I resent loving someone, but because I resent how easily my heart forgets every promise I’ve made to myself.

I tell myself I’ll stay independent this time. That I’ll keep my routines, my hobbies, my world. Yet love has a way of rearranging the furniture in my soul until everything points toward them. They don’t ask me to. They don’t demand it. It just happens. Slowly. Naturally. Terrifyingly.

And then I realize the person I swore I’d never need has become the first person I want to tell everything to.

That’s the cruel irony of me.

I hate depending on people because dependence feels like handing someone the map to every place they could hurt me. But love isn’t just wanting someone it’s unconsciously making them part of the rhythm of your life. They become the person you reach for before anyone else. The place your thoughts go when something good happens. The comfort your body remembers before your mind catches up.

Losing someone like that isn’t just losing a person.

It’s waking up and realizing your routines don’t know where to go anymore. It’s hearing silence where their voice used to live. It’s learning how to exist in a life you accidentally built with someone else’s footsteps beside yours.

Maybe that’s why I fight dependence so hard.

Because I know that when I love, I don’t do it halfway. I don’t simply let someone into my life.

Without meaning to, I start building my life around theirs.

And every time they leave, I have to learn how to build a home for myself all over again