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What Do You Really Love?

Maybe catastrophe isn’t always that bad.

Ryan Frawley
5 min readMar 16, 2020
Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash

Knowing that relationships end doesn’t make breaking up any easier.

And the more intense the feelings, the greater the pain.

But we outgrow relationships, just as we outgrow places. Or they outgrow us. One day, the place or the person that once seemed so fascinating will be just another memory you picked up along the way.

And that’s how it’s meant to be. Change is the one constant, the guiding rule of existence, and if the sun never set, it would never be able to rise.

And maybe, what you love in a person or a place isn’t what you thought it was at all.

She cried when I told her I was leaving.

I mean red-faced sobbing, the ugly crying of a child that doesn’t understand why she can’t have what she wants. Why all the honey has turned to poison.

She was starting to dream, and it was starting to scare me. We were both young, but in certain ways that have nothing to do with the calendar, she was much younger than I was.

In the small town she grew up in, people married their high school partners. Her parents had started to make hints to their 20-year-old daughter…

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Ryan Frawley
Ryan Frawley

Written by Ryan Frawley

Novelist. Essayist. Former entomologist. Now a full-time writer exploring travel, art, philosophy, psychology, and science. www.ryanfrawley.com

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