I don’t think people speak enough about the quiet regret that follows after being vulnerable with someone you believed was safe. There is a particular kind of heartbreak in realising that the hands you trusted to hold your truth were the same ones that made you regret revealing it at all. It makes you mourn not only the person, but also the softness in you that trusted so openly. And perhaps that is why betrayal feels so heavy, because it teaches the heart to hesitate where it once reached naturally.
The kindest thing literature does is remind you that your peculiar little feelings have always existed. Someone, in some century, was equally confused by love, bored by society, tired of performing, and hungry for meaning.