When the timing is yours to miss

I’ve often said that a lot of men in my life have fumbled me - as a partner, as a woman, as someone who would have loved them well.

I’ve said it casually, sometimes jokingly, and sometimes while quietly aching behind it. That after a connection ends, I wonder if they know. If they know that I was a good woman. A high-caliber woman. The kind of partner who would have shown up fully, consistently, intentionally. The kind they might one day look back on and realize they weren’t ready for when they had the chance.

And for a long time, I was comfortable sitting in that narrative - the idea that I was always the one being met at the wrong time.

Until this morning, when I asked myself something uncomfortable:

Have I ever done that to someone else?

Last night, I dreamt about someone from my past. Someone who was never more than a friend, but who existed in that almost-something space for years. He tried to pursue me once, told me that he had feelings for me. Other people confirmed it too. And yet, I never gave us a chance.

I don’t know if it was because I wasn’t attracted to him at the time, or because I simply wasn’t ready, or because I sensed something that scared me. What I do remember vividly is a moment in my early twenties - maybe twenty-one or twenty-two - when I thought to myself: If I give him a chance now, this will be forever.

Not forever in the dreamy, romantic sense - but in the serious one. The kind of forever that feels like marriage energy. The kind of man you don’t casually date, because once you open that door, you’re not just experimenting. You’re choosing.

And that terrified me.

I felt like my life was just beginning. I wanted freedom, movement, experience. And he felt too good, too steady, too real for the version of myself I was about to become. So I chose not to choose him at all.

As the years passed, I watched him grow. We both did. And then life happened - I moved away from the city we grew up in, friendships shifted, time did what it always does. Slowly, without ceremony, we lost touch.

Then, a year or two ago, I saw that he had entered a relationship.

I was happy for him - genuinely. But I would be lying if I said there wasn’t a sting. A quiet, irrational feeling that he was somehow supposed to wait for me. Even though he was never mine. Even though I had made it clear, through inaction, that I didn’t want him.

It’s been a good while since we last spoke.

And yet, last night, there he was - in my dream. We were reconnecting, but not as strangers. We carried all the history with us of the friendship we once had. It was that sort of comforting feeling when you're in a room full of strangers and suddenly see a face you know. Warmth.

I woke up feeling oddly deflated.

Not because I want him now - but because a question lodged itself in my chest and refused to leave:

What if he was the one who met ME at the wrong time?

I’m used to being on the other side of that sentence. I’m used to being the woman who meets the right person when they aren’t ready. But this time, the roles were reversed.

And I can’t help but wonder how differently things might have unfolded if I had been braver, or less afraid, or simply more open back then.

Maybe missed opportunities don’t always look like heartbreak.

Maybe sometimes they look like peace you weren’t ready to recognize.

And maybe fumbling someone doesn’t always come from carelessness - sometimes it comes from timing, fear, and the quiet belief that there will always be more time later.

But there isn’t.

There’s only when you meet - and who you are when you do.

P.S. Happiest new year to all! I am so happy that you are joining me on another year of creating on this platform. Thank you for supporting my passions, for reading along and for encouraging me to keep writing. Love you all!!

And for the first time this year and as always, thanks for coming to my Cez talk xo

Subconsciously attached

I never realized how much I was still holding on — even after a connection had technically ended.

A few days ago, I saw something that hurt my feelings. Not because it was cruel or unexpected, but because it forced me to confront something I hadn’t fully admitted to myself yet: I have been keeping the door open. Just slightly. Quietly. Mostly without realizing.

The connection itself didn’t end badly. There was no betrayal, no explosion, no clear villain. It ended in that particularly confusing way - a person that felt like the right person, wrong time. The kind of ending that doesn’t feel like an ending at all, but more like an unfinished sentence.

And because there was no fault or dramatic closure, I told myself I was being mature by staying connected. Remaining friendly. Keeping them on Instagram. Not burning bridges.

At least, that’s what I said out loud.

When I really sat with the disappointment I felt after seeing them move on, I realized something more uncomfortable: I wasn’t keeping the bridge intact for neutrality or future usefulness. I was keeping it intact because a part of me believed that this ongoing proximity - the follows, the story views, the occasional check-in, meant reconciliation was still possible.

That maybe if the timing shifted, maybe if I posted the right thing or maybe if they missed me just enough.

Maybe one day they’d walk back through that barely cracked door.

And once I noticed that, I couldn’t unsee it.

Because it wasn’t just them.

It was a pattern.

There were other connections over the years that ended gently, prematurely, without a clean break. People I told myself I was “over,” yet never fully released. People whose posts about moving on stung - not enough to make me cut ties, but enough to quietly hurt. Enough to remind me that I was still watching from the sidelines, hoping for an alternate ending.

What I hadn’t realized was that by leaving the door cracked open, I was allowing them to move on freely — while I stayed tethered to potential.

I was doing all the “right” things on paper. Dating. Meeting new people. Exploring new connections. Living my life.

But somewhere in the background, there was always that tiny glimmer of hope. The belief that one Instagram story might be enough to pull them back into my orbit. That hope was subtle - but it was powerful enough to slow my healing.

Because you can’t fully move forward while secretly negotiating with the past.

This isn’t about bitterness or resentment. It’s not about shame. It’s about noticing the quiet ways attachment survives long after logic says it shouldn’t. The ways we tell ourselves we’re being open-minded, when in reality, we’re afraid of fully closing the door. The way that I did time and time again.

And maybe closure isn’t always a conversation.

Maybe sometimes it’s an action.

Maybe sometimes it’s choosing yourself over potential.

I think healing really begins when you stop waiting for someone to return - and start giving yourself permission to leave.

And maybe, just maybe, true healing starts with hitting that unfollow button.

3 a.m. and I must be lonely

Last night I woke up at 3 a.m. to use the bathroom. Nothing unusual - I wake up in the middle of the night more often than I’d like these days. I slipped back into bed with the hope that I’d fall asleep immediately, but instead, the thoughts rushed in uninvited, the way they tend to at that hour.

I remembered how I once told you that one day I wanted to share a story with you. A synchronicity. A ridiculous, almost cinematic little moment that made too much sense at the time. I told you I’d only share it with you if we made it. And I had you write it down so I wouldn’t forget to tell you - in the event that we did.

But we never did.

And I never told you the story.

For reasons I can’t fully explain, that realization hit me harder at 3 a.m. than it ever would at any other time of day. Not because what we had was some grand, sweeping love story - it wasn’t that, and it never had the time to become that. But there was something there, something real enough that I was curious to see where it could go.

Something that felt like it deserved more time than it got.

Most days I don’t dwell on it. My life is full. I stay busy, picked up new hobbies, and I don’t walk around haunted. But 3 a.m. has its own gravitational pull. It doesn’t care about perspective or logic or the fact that I’ve mostly put this behind me. It arrives when I’m too tired to redirect my thoughts and too awake to ignore them.

It reminded me of that Matchbox Twenty lyric - It’s 3 a.m. and I must be lonely.

But it’s not really loneliness. It’s just the quiet. The openness. The place where all the distractions fall away and something unfinished has room to echo.

Writing is how I sort through that. Not to romanticize it into something bigger than it was, but because it mattered enough to linger. There’s a specific ache to something that almost was - not heartbreak, not devastation, just a soft, persistent wondering.

I can’t stop a 3 a.m. thought because it’s the most honest hour of my day.

I can’t stop a 3 a.m. thought because I’m lying there in the dark with nothing but the truth of what resurfaces.

I can’t stop a 3 a.m. thought because it’s the most poetic hour of my life and also the most heartbreaking.

I can’t stop a 3 a.m. thought because it’s too intimate, too vulnerable, and I’m too tired to build walls against it.

I can’t stop a 3 a.m. thought because at that hour, there’s nothing left to distract myself with.

So here I was - wide awake over a story I meant to tell someone I barely got the chance to know.

And maybe that’s exactly why it lingers -

Not because it was everything, but because it never had enough time to become anything at all.