This is one of the hardest truths to accept: love can be real and still not be right. You can have tenderness, history, longing, even loyalty, and still be standing in something that cannot hold your life. That is what makes it so difficult to leave. If it had all been false, the heart would know what to do. But when something was beautiful and still became painful, the mind keeps returning to it like a hand to an old scar, not to reopen it, but to check whether it still hurts.
