The most tragic story isn't the one written by Shakespeare
or Hans Christian Andersen

It is not about Romeo, Juliet and their forbidden love, dying together

Nor a man, a mermaid and their impossibility to live for each other

It is about a writer and a reader:
Where the writer has written down, in every language, every realistic & imaginable word & emotion for the world
But the reader doesn't even have a chance to read them

The most tragic story is about the reader who can not read, and in the end, the writer who will not write

The most tragic happily ever after is where the reader and writer end each other

some things are not meant to be returned
be it a library’s borrowed book
or hands that cannot hold ours and leave us cold

because we need those things
as reminders of the people
who once borrowed or took what belongs to us

and in our story

i know why i remember you so well:
it is my warmth which you borrowed
and my heart that you took

I was always looking at you, always at your back. Watching your every fall and every rise. It's too unfortunate I'm too close to you. I can't see your face because I'm always behind you, staring with my eyes from afar and with my heart from nearby. I'm afraid that if I touch your back, you'll turn out to be the person I wouldn't have thought of. I can't say hello just to say goodbye in the end. I'd rather have us stay this way, me tailing you and observing you grow. It is better for me not to get to know you and be disappointed with just myself, than have known you and be disappointed with you and myself. That way I can leave easier.

I thought of the boy who has yet to be the best of himself. I thought of how the love I felt for him seemed like a crooked line, wanting to bend and curve into any shape possible. I thought of how his words enraptured me like a tornado with its never-ending cyclonic movement; a cycle of feeling the rush of breathlessness. I thought of how the boy has my heart and mind racing in a circle. I thought of how he was soon to grow into a hurricane, ready to captivate others beside me. I thought again of how he has yet to be the best of himself; give him a thousand rotations of the clock to grow. But I realized how much better I can be for him by then, when now he has already gotten the best of me.