What I Told You While You Pretended to Sleep
I spoke to you while you pretended to sleep because the rawest truths need darkness to emerge. I told you that your cardboard empowerment crumbles every time you open your legs seeking validation, that you confuse freedom with libertinism. Your social media feminism crashes against the reality of your empty early mornings, where you’re still waiting for someone to fill a void you yourself cannot even define.
Women choose who to sleep with; men choose who to marry. That phrase twists your guts because you know it’s true. You sell yourself the lie that you’re in control of the situation, but you keep waking up in strange beds hoping that sex will magically turn into love. You keep mistaking power for desperation disguised as freedom, yet it remains you who fails to value what you have right beside you.
I fall silent because it’s easier to deceive oneself than to accept defeat. Like a beggar who mistakes a shop window for reality, I promise to call “love” the first person who doesn’t hurt me, knowing I’m lying. Laughter will become a luxury I’ll forget once I’ve forgotten you, but for now, I light candles in secret, hoping a stroke of luck will bring you back to me. You could have been what I hoped for, but in the end, it never arrived—your desires won out over the promises made.
The problem isn’t being a woman or a feminist; it’s being too cowardly to demand what you truly want. Real freedom isn’t about proving you can sleep with anyone you please. That’s cheap libertinism. True freedom is choosing silence when words are unnecessary, loving without taking hostages, being vulnerable without losing your dignity. It’s understanding that you can be independent without renouncing your capacity to feel.
No matter what happens, and even if someone else stands by my side, in silence, you were my everything, and for that, I will love you—but not for what we are now. Because real loves don’t need to be remembered as ghosts of what could have been, back when you chose to leave rather than stay.
