The Weight of a Rose
People kept telling her that she would get over him.
It was almost always said with good intentions, usually accompanied by the same familiar assurances: give it time, keep yourself busy, stop thinking about him, meet new people, focus on yourself. She knew they were trying to help, and perhaps there was nothing else anyone could say to a person whose heart had just been handed back to her after she had spent years placing it in someone else's hands. Still, every time somebody told her that she would eventually “get over him,” something about those words felt terribly inadequate.
Getting over rejection was one thing. Rejection wounded the ego, embarrassed hope and forced a person to accept an answer they had desperately wanted to be different. Perhaps time could heal that. Perhaps one could eventually understand that another person's refusal was not a verdict on one's worth. But getting over someone who had become your world was something else entirely. How were you supposed to “get over” a person who had quietly entered the architecture of your everyday life? Someone whose existence had become connected to songs, roads, restaurants, jokes, mornings, difficult nights, random photographs and hundreds of ordinary moments that had seemed insignificant while they were happening?
Nobody tells you how to remove a person from things.
There were places she could no longer visit without remembering something he had said there. There were songs whose first few seconds were enough to transport her years backwards. There were words and expressions she had unconsciously borrowed from him. Sometimes something funny would happen and, before she could stop herself, her mind would think of telling him. Sometimes she would see something he would have liked and instinctively reach for her phone. It was only a second later that she would remember that she was supposed to be learning how not to need him anymore.
That was the strange cruelty of heartbreak. The relationship could change in a conversation, but the mind did not receive the announcement at the same speed.
Perhaps that was why she kept wondering whether people ever truly got over anyone.
Maybe they didn't.
Maybe they simply became very good at carrying things.
They woke up, went to work, answered emails, laughed when somebody made a joke, attended weddings, bought groceries, travelled, changed jobs, celebrated birthdays and uploaded photographs in which they looked perfectly fine. From the outside, everything eventually returned to normal. People saw the smile and assumed the wound had disappeared. Nobody could see that sometimes happiness and grief had simply learned to occupy the same body.
Perhaps that was what adulthood really was: walking through the world carrying invisible pieces of every person who had once mattered enormously to you.
Years before she had ever understood heartbreak this way, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry had written something in The Little Prince that she now understood differently:
“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
For years she had thought it was simply a beautiful sentence about love. Now it felt almost painfully accurate.
Because what could anyone looking at her possibly see?
They could see that the relationship had not happened. They could see that he had not chosen her. They could calculate the situation logically and tell her that there were billions of people in the world, that she would meet someone else, that she shouldn't waste her life over one man.
And logically, they weren't wrong.
But the most important parts of her story had never been visible.
Nobody could see the thousands of conversations that had built the attachment one ordinary day at a time. Nobody could see the comfort of simply knowing he existed somewhere in the world. Nobody could see how many times his name had appeared silently inside her prayers, or how many futures she had constructed without ever telling another person. Nobody could measure the strange security of knowing someone's moods, expressions, silences and habits so intimately that their presence began to feel less like another human being and more like home.
Those things were invisible.
And perhaps that was precisely Saint-Exupéry's point. The deepest value of a human connection often cannot be explained by what an outsider can observe. The eye sees an ordinary person. The heart sees history. The eye sees someone who rejected you. The heart remembers the person beside whom thousands of invisible moments accumulated until that ordinary human being became unlike anyone else in the world.
That was why another line from The Little Prince hurt even more:
“It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.”
The word wasted sounded almost cruel after heartbreak.
Everyone kept telling her not to waste any more time on him. Sometimes she told herself the same thing. She looked back at the years and wondered whether she had been foolish. What else could she have done with all that time? Who else might she have met? How much pain could she have avoided if she had simply walked away sooner?
But Saint-Exupéry's rose suggested something more complicated.
The rose wasn't precious because it was objectively the most extraordinary rose in existence. There were other roses. The Little Prince eventually discovered an entire garden filled with them. His rose became his rose because of the relationship he had formed with it—because he had watered it, protected it, listened to it, worried about it and given it something that could never be recovered once spent: his time.
That was what she finally understood about him.
Perhaps he wasn't objectively the most extraordinary man in the world. There were kinder men somewhere, perhaps more compatible ones, perhaps men who would someday love her without needing to be persuaded. She could intellectually accept all of that and still find him irreplaceable.
Because people don't become important to us through comparison.
They become important through investment.
Through Tuesday afternoons and midnight conversations. Through fights that somehow become memories. Through waiting. Through forgiving. Through stupid jokes that nobody else would understand. Through noticing exactly how someone drinks their coffee and how their voice changes when they're tired. Through years of seeing the same face until the face becomes associated with safety, desire, anger, comfort, pain, longing and home all at once.
It was the time she had given to her rose that had made her rose important.
And perhaps that was why “just move on” felt like such an impossible instruction. She wasn't being asked merely to stop wanting a relationship. She was being asked to rearrange years of emotional meaning.
But there was another truth hidden inside the metaphor that she initially didn't want to see.
The fact that her rose was important did not mean she had to spend the rest of her life standing beside it.
Time explained the attachment. It did not necessarily command the future.
That distinction took her months to understand.
The years she had given him were precisely why walking away hurt so badly, but those same years could not become the reason she gave him every year that remained. Otherwise love would quietly turn into a debt she owed her own past. She would keep staying because she had already stayed, keep hoping because she had already hoped, keep waiting because she had already waited.
She didn't want to call those years a waste. They had contained some of the most genuine love she had ever felt. But neither did she want the beauty of what she had given to become a prison.
So perhaps getting over someone didn't mean reaching a morning when you suddenly remembered nothing.
Perhaps it meant something much quieter.
Maybe one day she would hear his name and feel tenderness instead of panic. Maybe she would pass an old place and remember what happened there without wishing she could climb inside the memory. Maybe a song would play and she would let it finish. Maybe she would think of telling him something funny and then smile at the old instinct rather than feeling devastated that she couldn't.
Maybe healing wasn't forgetting the rose.
Maybe it was learning that the garden was bigger than the rose.
There would still be days when she missed him. Perhaps there would always be a particular version of herself that existed only in memories with him, and perhaps losing a person also meant losing access to the person you had been when they were beside you. That deserved grief too.
But she began to understand that carrying someone wasn't necessarily the same thing as waiting for them.
She could carry the memories without carrying the expectation.
She could remember his birthday without sending the message.
She could miss his voice without calling.
She could acknowledge that she had once imagined growing old beside him without continuing to organize her future around the possibility.
She could even continue loving some version of him inside her memory while accepting that the living, breathing person outside that memory had made a different choice.
Perhaps that was the hardest form of love: allowing reality to be more important than longing.
And slowly, she stopped asking herself whether she had completely gotten over him, because she realized that perhaps it was the wrong question.
Some people are not illnesses to recover from.
Some people become chapters.
You don't “get over” a chapter of your own life. You turn the page. Everything written before it remains exactly where it was. Turning the page doesn't erase the sentences, doesn't make them meaningless and doesn't mean you regret reading them. It simply means there are still blank pages after them, and eventually you have to decide whether one unfinished story deserves all of those pages too.
Maybe years later someone would look at her and think she had completely moved on. They would see her laughing again, travelling somewhere beautiful, building a different life, perhaps even loving someone else. They wouldn't know that somewhere inside her existed a small room containing an old version of herself and a person she had once believed would remain forever.
But that would be okay.
Because what is essential is invisible to the eye.
The world didn't need to see everything she carried for it to have been real.
And perhaps she would finally understand that carrying a few broken pieces did not mean she was still broken. Human beings carry pieces of everything they have loved: childhood homes, dead relatives, abandoned dreams, old friendships, first loves, unanswered prayers and people they once thought they couldn't survive without. We don't always discard those pieces when we heal. Sometimes we simply learn where they belong.
He had once been her entire world.
She didn't need to lie about that in order to move forward.
She only needed to understand that someone can once have been your world without remaining your whole world forever.
Her love had made him important. Her time had made him her rose. Her heart had seen things in him that perhaps nobody else could ever understand, because the most essential things between two people had always been invisible to everyone standing outside them.
But eventually she understood something else too.
The Little Prince had a rose.
He loved his rose.
And still, he travelled.
Perhaps she could too.
~AV✍🏻✨
It was almost always said with good intentions, usually accompanied by the same familiar assurances: give it time, keep yourself busy, stop thinking about him, meet new people, focus on yourself. She knew they were trying to help, and perhaps there was nothing else anyone could say to a person whose heart had just been handed back to her after she had spent years placing it in someone else's hands. Still, every time somebody told her that she would eventually “get over him,” something about those words felt terribly inadequate.
Getting over rejection was one thing. Rejection wounded the ego, embarrassed hope and forced a person to accept an answer they had desperately wanted to be different. Perhaps time could heal that. Perhaps one could eventually understand that another person's refusal was not a verdict on one's worth. But getting over someone who had become your world was something else entirely. How were you supposed to “get over” a person who had quietly entered the architecture of your everyday life? Someone whose existence had become connected to songs, roads, restaurants, jokes, mornings, difficult nights, random photographs and hundreds of ordinary moments that had seemed insignificant while they were happening?
Nobody tells you how to remove a person from things.
There were places she could no longer visit without remembering something he had said there. There were songs whose first few seconds were enough to transport her years backwards. There were words and expressions she had unconsciously borrowed from him. Sometimes something funny would happen and, before she could stop herself, her mind would think of telling him. Sometimes she would see something he would have liked and instinctively reach for her phone. It was only a second later that she would remember that she was supposed to be learning how not to need him anymore.
That was the strange cruelty of heartbreak. The relationship could change in a conversation, but the mind did not receive the announcement at the same speed.
Perhaps that was why she kept wondering whether people ever truly got over anyone.
Maybe they didn't.
Maybe they simply became very good at carrying things.
They woke up, went to work, answered emails, laughed when somebody made a joke, attended weddings, bought groceries, travelled, changed jobs, celebrated birthdays and uploaded photographs in which they looked perfectly fine. From the outside, everything eventually returned to normal. People saw the smile and assumed the wound had disappeared. Nobody could see that sometimes happiness and grief had simply learned to occupy the same body.
Perhaps that was what adulthood really was: walking through the world carrying invisible pieces of every person who had once mattered enormously to you.
Years before she had ever understood heartbreak this way, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry had written something in The Little Prince that she now understood differently:
“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
For years she had thought it was simply a beautiful sentence about love. Now it felt almost painfully accurate.
Because what could anyone looking at her possibly see?
They could see that the relationship had not happened. They could see that he had not chosen her. They could calculate the situation logically and tell her that there were billions of people in the world, that she would meet someone else, that she shouldn't waste her life over one man.
And logically, they weren't wrong.
But the most important parts of her story had never been visible.
Nobody could see the thousands of conversations that had built the attachment one ordinary day at a time. Nobody could see the comfort of simply knowing he existed somewhere in the world. Nobody could see how many times his name had appeared silently inside her prayers, or how many futures she had constructed without ever telling another person. Nobody could measure the strange security of knowing someone's moods, expressions, silences and habits so intimately that their presence began to feel less like another human being and more like home.
Those things were invisible.
And perhaps that was precisely Saint-Exupéry's point. The deepest value of a human connection often cannot be explained by what an outsider can observe. The eye sees an ordinary person. The heart sees history. The eye sees someone who rejected you. The heart remembers the person beside whom thousands of invisible moments accumulated until that ordinary human being became unlike anyone else in the world.
That was why another line from The Little Prince hurt even more:
“It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.”
The word wasted sounded almost cruel after heartbreak.
Everyone kept telling her not to waste any more time on him. Sometimes she told herself the same thing. She looked back at the years and wondered whether she had been foolish. What else could she have done with all that time? Who else might she have met? How much pain could she have avoided if she had simply walked away sooner?
But Saint-Exupéry's rose suggested something more complicated.
The rose wasn't precious because it was objectively the most extraordinary rose in existence. There were other roses. The Little Prince eventually discovered an entire garden filled with them. His rose became his rose because of the relationship he had formed with it—because he had watered it, protected it, listened to it, worried about it and given it something that could never be recovered once spent: his time.
That was what she finally understood about him.
Perhaps he wasn't objectively the most extraordinary man in the world. There were kinder men somewhere, perhaps more compatible ones, perhaps men who would someday love her without needing to be persuaded. She could intellectually accept all of that and still find him irreplaceable.
Because people don't become important to us through comparison.
They become important through investment.
Through Tuesday afternoons and midnight conversations. Through fights that somehow become memories. Through waiting. Through forgiving. Through stupid jokes that nobody else would understand. Through noticing exactly how someone drinks their coffee and how their voice changes when they're tired. Through years of seeing the same face until the face becomes associated with safety, desire, anger, comfort, pain, longing and home all at once.
It was the time she had given to her rose that had made her rose important.
And perhaps that was why “just move on” felt like such an impossible instruction. She wasn't being asked merely to stop wanting a relationship. She was being asked to rearrange years of emotional meaning.
But there was another truth hidden inside the metaphor that she initially didn't want to see.
The fact that her rose was important did not mean she had to spend the rest of her life standing beside it.
Time explained the attachment. It did not necessarily command the future.
That distinction took her months to understand.
The years she had given him were precisely why walking away hurt so badly, but those same years could not become the reason she gave him every year that remained. Otherwise love would quietly turn into a debt she owed her own past. She would keep staying because she had already stayed, keep hoping because she had already hoped, keep waiting because she had already waited.
She didn't want to call those years a waste. They had contained some of the most genuine love she had ever felt. But neither did she want the beauty of what she had given to become a prison.
So perhaps getting over someone didn't mean reaching a morning when you suddenly remembered nothing.
Perhaps it meant something much quieter.
Maybe one day she would hear his name and feel tenderness instead of panic. Maybe she would pass an old place and remember what happened there without wishing she could climb inside the memory. Maybe a song would play and she would let it finish. Maybe she would think of telling him something funny and then smile at the old instinct rather than feeling devastated that she couldn't.
Maybe healing wasn't forgetting the rose.
Maybe it was learning that the garden was bigger than the rose.
There would still be days when she missed him. Perhaps there would always be a particular version of herself that existed only in memories with him, and perhaps losing a person also meant losing access to the person you had been when they were beside you. That deserved grief too.
But she began to understand that carrying someone wasn't necessarily the same thing as waiting for them.
She could carry the memories without carrying the expectation.
She could remember his birthday without sending the message.
She could miss his voice without calling.
She could acknowledge that she had once imagined growing old beside him without continuing to organize her future around the possibility.
She could even continue loving some version of him inside her memory while accepting that the living, breathing person outside that memory had made a different choice.
Perhaps that was the hardest form of love: allowing reality to be more important than longing.
And slowly, she stopped asking herself whether she had completely gotten over him, because she realized that perhaps it was the wrong question.
Some people are not illnesses to recover from.
Some people become chapters.
You don't “get over” a chapter of your own life. You turn the page. Everything written before it remains exactly where it was. Turning the page doesn't erase the sentences, doesn't make them meaningless and doesn't mean you regret reading them. It simply means there are still blank pages after them, and eventually you have to decide whether one unfinished story deserves all of those pages too.
Maybe years later someone would look at her and think she had completely moved on. They would see her laughing again, travelling somewhere beautiful, building a different life, perhaps even loving someone else. They wouldn't know that somewhere inside her existed a small room containing an old version of herself and a person she had once believed would remain forever.
But that would be okay.
Because what is essential is invisible to the eye.
The world didn't need to see everything she carried for it to have been real.
And perhaps she would finally understand that carrying a few broken pieces did not mean she was still broken. Human beings carry pieces of everything they have loved: childhood homes, dead relatives, abandoned dreams, old friendships, first loves, unanswered prayers and people they once thought they couldn't survive without. We don't always discard those pieces when we heal. Sometimes we simply learn where they belong.
He had once been her entire world.
She didn't need to lie about that in order to move forward.
She only needed to understand that someone can once have been your world without remaining your whole world forever.
Her love had made him important. Her time had made him her rose. Her heart had seen things in him that perhaps nobody else could ever understand, because the most essential things between two people had always been invisible to everyone standing outside them.
But eventually she understood something else too.
The Little Prince had a rose.
He loved his rose.
And still, he travelled.
Perhaps she could too.
~AV✍🏻✨
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