𝗟𝗜𝗧𝗘𝗥𝗔𝗥𝗬: “All I Have Left Is Hoping You Don’t Reach Out” by Allaina Roane M. Blanquisco

Published by: Reiven Presbetero

Date Published: January 16, 2026

Time Published: 6:37 AM

I hope you don’t reach out this Christmas, or anytime at all. The season makes ghosts bold, and I am tired of answering doors that open into old winters. We have rehearsed this dance for years—argument as ritual, banter as a bruise we keep calling humor. It feels normal now, which is the most frightening part. Normal like the creak of a stair you know will give way, normal like loving someone in a house built to collapse.

I hope the silence between us stays intact. My quiet is not a puzzle meant for you to solve. It is a boundary drawn with shaking hands. You asked me to prove my love until love felt like a performance I was failing on purpose. Your fear demanded reassurance the way fire demands oxygen, and I learned to shrink just to breathe. You call that avoidance; I call it survival. I am no longer interested in explaining the difference.

I hope you let go of the idea that you were never chosen. When you frame my love as default rather than desire, something in me shatters and still leans toward you. I stand stunned in the wreckage, holding years like evidence—late nights, shared jokes, the ordinary miracles of being chosen. As far as I knew, you were never an accident. You were a constant. You were someone I chose without hesitation, someone I kept choosing even when it hurt. But I eventually grew tired of trying to protect a truth that kept being turned against me. I know what I gave. I know who you were to me. Your doubt does not get to erase that.

I hope we never mistake familiarity for fate again. Cycles are cruel magicians; they convince us the ending will change if we repeat the beginning with better timing. Every return taught me the same lesson: love can be sincere and still be wrong for the shape of who we are. Friend turned lover turned stranger wasn’t tragedy—it was inevitability. This was always going to end once one of us learned to stop coming back. Stone doesn’t choose to leave the river; it is worn away.

I hope I learn to miss you without reopening the wound. I am practicing distance like a new language, learning that space is not indifference but mercy. I am done being cross-examined for feelings I already gave you whole. My distance was never cruelty; it was the last truth I had left. I refuse to keep shrinking myself into someone easier to hold. Wanting peace does not make me cruel. It makes me honest.

I hope this is where we finally end. Not with anger, not with one last message dressed as closure, but with restraint. Let dust fall on unanswered phones. Let what we were loosen its grip. If we mattered—and I believe we did—then let that mattering rest, unproven and untouched. I am choosing peace with the same certainty I once chose you. That is the truth, and it is enough. Some doors don’t close gently—they shut because they have to. 

This Christmas, your absence is the one gift I choose to keep.