i hope one day you learn to look into the corners and see that the webs were not cobwebs brought about by the lengthy days we had. they are strings painstakingly spun through the tough yet beautiful years that we have, all of those keeping me tethered to you. i hope you learn to read between the letters and the lines, that each one was made as a puzzle for you. i hope that one day you will learn that i cared about you as much as you cared about me. now that it's all over, i hope that you learn that my love does not lie in the open. you know how secretive i am. i would not leave the thing i value the most out in the open, just for people to try and take it from me. no, this is why you thought i never cared. i hope you bothered looking under your pillow or in the books i lent to you. it is in the ruffled sheets of our nights and mornings together. i slipped my smile for you in every single one of the pages i dog-eared for you. i hope you found it at 2 am, in the mornings with me. it was in my sleepy kisses and the way i huddled close against you. i hope you felt it in the way i ran back to you, every single time, when my rain poured only for you. i hope you hear it in all of my playlists about you that i never told you about. i hope you heard it in my giggling to the silliest things you said, and i hope you unraveled it in the way every single night i hugged you good-bye. i hope you felt it in our goofy dancing under the stars, eighteen kilometers apart. not far, but not close enough. i hope you realized it was in my tears, till the very last time i tried to fight for us. i hope you felt it in the way i gripped your hand as we walked a moon-lit street, and i hope you remember it in the way i asked for your embrace for the last time. to be perfectly candid, i was so nervous that night, but the way you held me, as it always did, calmed me down. i will always remember how you smelled that night, like sunshine, and you walked like it too. you brought me home that day, and i asked you one last time if you still loved me. i hope you heard it in my silence, anxious yet relieved, when only nothingness filled the car on the way to my front porch. i wondered why the silence was deafening even when there were no words uttered, even though my world was crumbling down under the tires of your car.