Why don't we start again from the beginning ?

"Why don't we start again from the beginning?" /Mike Lim

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Sometimes what we call love is nothing more than two lonely souls meeting at the wrong time, drawing near by the wrong means, and settling into a long, quiet tug-of-war between control and escape.

One person's obsession has never been proof of devotion — it is, rather, a slow consumption of the self, a gradual walk toward one's own undoing. We tell ourselves that if we give everything, we might build a warm enough nest for the one we love; that if we love hard enough, the one who has wandered so long will finally fold their restless wings and stay.

But the true mistake is never loving too much — it is misunderstanding what love is.

When love is reduced to boundless tolerance, when it becomes a duty of self-sacrifice dressed up as devotion, it loses the lightness and freedom that were once its very nature. Silence begins to stand in for listening. Restraint takes the place of honest conversation. Brick by brick, a wall goes up — and in the end, it imprisons not only the other person, but the self that refuses, still, to let itself go.

Do you know something? That kind of clinging is, more often than not, not love at all, but fear — fear of loneliness, of facing the long night alone. And so we stake our dignity, our hopes, our whole future, on a relationship already trembling on its foundations, as though holding on tightly enough could stop the whole world from slipping away.

Talking of such things, a line from an old film surfaced in my mind, one I hadn't thought of in years: 

"Why don't we start again from the beginning?"

But can we, really, ever start again?

Perhaps this is the cruellest and, at once, the gentlest truth of being alive: some people are only ever meant to walk part of the road with us — to become the deepest ache in our memory, without ever making it to the end of our days. Their purpose was never to be possessed. It was to teach us how to grow, how to lose, and how to make peace with what remains unresolved.

In the end, not every meeting arrives at completion. Not every love, however deeply felt, is met with understanding.

For some souls, what they spend a lifetime seeking is not a grand, consuming romance, but simply a place where the heart can finally rest — to be understood, accepted, and at peace. And sadly, that resting place is not always found in another person at all. It comes, quietly, only after we have learned to sit with ourselves, alone.

10.07.2026 Ipoh Making Peace with Solitude