The Echo of Unlovable

The question came in the quiet after a storm—
not the weathered kind,
but the kind that breaks behind closed doors,
where relationships strain in the silence.

“Why are we not lovable?”

He asked it with the weariness of a man unspooling.
She answered as a mother—
confused, searching for footing,
trying to patch his pain with soft reassurance.

“What do you mean?” she asked,
as if clarification might soften the truth.
As if her own ribs hadn’t just buckled.

But he meant it.
He meant her, too.
He saw her aloneness and named it something ugly: unwanted.
And it shattered something she thought had healed.

She’d long believed her solitude was a choice,
a sacred quiet she carried on her own terms.
But his words remapped the landscape,
made her doubt the truth she’d crafted so carefully.

Does being alone mean being unlovable?
Is that how the world sees her—
a woman full of love
with no one to hand it to?

The question wasn’t just his.
It was the question of her lineage,
of every woman in her family
who waited to be seen.

She didn’t know whether he was naming his pain,
or reflecting hers,
or if both had always been tangled.

What she knew was this:
she never wanted him to carry her ache.
She thought she’d kept it hidden,
buried beneath strong shoulders and light-hearted laughter.

But pain has a scent.
And children know how to follow it,
even when no one points to the trail.

She tried to recall the first time she wondered if she was unlovable—
maybe at fifteen,
when her father chose someone else.
Maybe every time silence met her vulnerability
with nothing but a nod and a turned back.

She wanted to shield her son.
But maybe shields are see-through.
Maybe protection is never perfect.

Maybe this is the wound we pass on:
the belief that love must be earned,
that worth is something to prove.

And maybe that’s the cruelest myth—
because it asks us to beg
for what should be ours by birthright.

In that moment,
when he said the words,
she broke—
not because she believed him,
but because some part of her did.

And she hated that.

She asked God not for answers,
but for a reason why she carries this love
that no one stays long enough to hold.

It is an ugly thought—
to feel unwanted,
to ask if all this feeling
was a design flaw.

But she sits with it.
And maybe that’s where the healing starts:
not in denying the ache,
but in naming it.
And letting it echo—
until it becomes something softer,
something truer,
something that no longer lies.

With Grace & Ink,

Mai