THIS IS HOW YOU TRY to fall out of Love.

Step One: you limit your interaction with them. You stop replying to their messages immediately. You don’t pick up their calls, well, immediately. You try to avoid them when you see them around. Sounds pretty doable, right?

Well, it was. That one time you didn’t reply right away or ignored their call and directed your attention to more pressing matters in your life, you felt as though you had this falling-out-of-love business under control. You felt in control of your heart and your thoughts.
But then, you can’t really help yourself, can you? You go right back to the cycle. You justify your prompt replies by telling yourself that it can be important, that it could be work. Well, it wasn’t always. But still.

But you praise yourself for being strong-willed enough to go through with your one goal – falling out of love. This is why you haven’t abandoned ship yet and convince yourself to try Step Two.

This is when you try feigning disinterest in the things and ideas that the two of you love. Thinking that maybe dissociating yourself from the common link between the two of you will be the fail-safe trick. One that will yield the assured result. But of course, you aren’t able to. You fail to dissociate because you love working and reading the same books and watching the movies that you have deep discussions about and listening to the same damn genre of music. You just can’t change who you fundamentally are as a person or how you think.

This is when you dare to voice to yourself the fact that it sucks. Big time. But you haven’t lost faith yet, you’re pretty determined and set in your ways, much like them. You chuckle at the latter though, remembering how similar you are to them. This is why you try.

You try to forget that one song they introduced you to. But then you fucking hum it to yourself at least twice a day and it hits you that this isn’t going the way you thought it would.

But you’re one determined little thing. You will yourself stronger – vowing to break free.

So you move on to the next step. Well, there isn’t clear demarcation of what this one entails so you just decide to roll with one simple plan of action: spending less time with our around them.

You reckon that not baring your thoughts to them will help your cause. So you try. You do until you realise that your mind craves the witty banter, the debates, the disagreements that helped you understand just how different you truly are from them and that this difference in opinion and perspective is one of the contributing factors to your affinity towards them.

Needless to say, third time wasn’t the charm.
And then in the midst of all this, you find them trying to be scarce, so you sadly rejoice, almost tasting the freedom. Alas! You’re anything but lucky enough for that situation to have remained.
You find yourself working with them again, closely. Because it is an admitted fact that the two of you make an amazing team and that isn’t you stupid love-addled brain speaking, it is in fact publically acknowledged by most people around you.

Which is why, it is no surprise that you don’t let you professional façade slip, with the amount of practice you’ve had, you think you’ve gotten better at it. That is until one day, your friend after watching the two of you interact, discreetly asks you if there is something going on between you and them. You utter a hasty No, of course, followed by an awkward bout of laughter just to lay emphasis on the supposed absurdity of your friend’s question. But your mind has already gone into overdrive.

It is now addled with thoughts about the possibility of such a situation. It contemplates endlessly over the nature of your relationship with them: is the attraction and emotional investment mutual or unrequited? You have no answer.

This is the moment when you try to think really hard about Step Four.

But you just can’t gather the will to move on to it. Which is why you try to remind yourself of the heaviness you feel every time they drift away from you after being a constant presence in your day, you try to remember how your relationship as friends hasn’t been what it should be. The way you regard them, they too promise that they do the same, but at least you are smart enough to remember an elementary lesson – actions speak louder than words.

So you steel yourself. You’re a wall, a fortress that despite being under attack still protects the ones inside.

Step Four is when you convince yourself that you will quit them Cold Turkey because they have become something akin to a habit. You vow to stop caring that very instant, and for a brief moment, you do. You do fall out of Love.

But then one day you find yourself agreeing to a walk with them at 2 am in the night.

Oh well, you never really were that smart in matters of the heart, to begin with.

So you curse yourself and fall deeper.

And eventually, you try to fall out of love again.
But we all know how that goes.

a/n

This was a one-shot that I literally finished writing twenty minutes ago. It has been a very long time since I wrote anything here, mostly because a lot has happened to me and my life and I guess I lost my inspiration somewhere. Not of writing, of course, but of posting my work here.

But this in particular felt like something someone out there could use.

So yeah. That's basically it.

I'd appreciate if anyone who still follows me/my work would read and provide feedback.

Thank you.

PS Hi, natwriter , halimalfoy!

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