Guest post by @crystalll; loving yourself

His wife does not speak to him. This has gone on for months. Not like he cares. Not like he sees her or notices the little things about her. Like how pale and thin she had become; like how her body is a fabric of wrinkles with veins sticking out like threads.

But this morning, she decides to talk to him. He grumbles yet sits down as he instinctively checks his watch. She speaks with a hoarse voice as if she had been through another round of tears. She tells him about how he reminds her of her childhood and geckos that scurried on the brown walls of her house; how she never killed these geckos because people said they were harmless. And though, these geckos littered her room with black, tiny spots of faeces, she let them stay. In her house, it was a gecko's world. Now, it's a man's world because a man will always be a man, she says. He will always scamper around with his two legs and another one; the one that dangles. And so she will let him stay in her heart even though he litters it with hurt. She will cling to this weighty trophy of being his wife.

He flushes. Sadness and regret courses through him, making his legs quiver. He leaves without a word and drives to the house of the other woman.

'My wife,' he starts, 'spoke to me this morning. That woman loves me. I don't want to disrespect her anymore. So you can't come to the house again. A hotel is where we will now meet.'....

I think when people leave our lives, what hurts us sometimes is not that they left, it is that we realise we can be dispensable. We come to terms with the fact that these people that once breathed in our essences like we were oxygen can also toss us into a trash can. What hurts even more is that we never know they'd leave. Maybe if we had known, we would have protected ourselves; shielded our hearts from hurt.

But most times when people leave, they give us clues. Clues we are blind to see. Or clues we see but yet wrap in a ball of trust—like a bitter pill wrapped in Eba—and stomach them. These clues are in the little things they do or do not do. It is in how we become insignificant; an afterthought.

So choose to see. Give [your] love. But not all of it. Reserve for yourself too. Because you are deserving of love. Because you are significant and a breath of fresh air. Because the inability of one to see your light does not make it dim.

So love yourself. And when people choose to walk, let them walk. Then love yourself even more....

Guest post submitted by @crystalll