The Greatest Love of All
July 26, 2026
There are places inside us that time never demolishes. We declare them a no man’s land and exile ourselves from ever crossing their borders again.
Until one morning, our subconscious glitches. It unlocks the gate, lets us wander amongst the ghosts and ruins, and seals it again with seven locks before breakfast.
Almost ten years later, it led me back to a prison whose gates I believed had closed behind me forever.
Every instant felt so real… I remembered all the love, and all the dust and pieces, still floating in the air with nowhere to land…
As I was saying goodbye, somewhere in the background Adele was singing a song I didn’t even know I knew. When I woke up, I tried to look up its title, but I couldn’t have told you a single lyric. All I could hear was the melody, playing over and over again.
It was Make You Feel My Love.
Yeah, dreams are weird like that…
Well, it all began on an island that looked as though it had escaped Heaven and somehow found its way to Earth.
The 4th of July. The day this love story began… and every unwritten moment was ours, stealing time because we both knew reality would one day come asking for it back.
We walked for hours through the little streets while fireworks lit up every step we took. Our chapter began on the biggest day, beneath the brightest sky. A scene too perfect to be unscripted.
Two true Virgos, happily virgoing through a virgin island summer. It was a love story even Hollywood wouldn’t know what to do with. There was simply no drama. We spoke our own language, lived inside our own little universe, and most of all, we were best friends.
Every day felt wonderfully ordinary in the most extraordinary way… We spent our days chasing the sun between my pool and the beach. Afternoons were lost to the little streets of Nantucket. By night, the house filled with friends, laughter, ridiculous conversations, and good movies we barely watched because we laughed through most of them.
More than anything, I remember laughing. Constantly. No one has ever made me laugh the way he did…. True love felt so effortless… We were too young to know it was one of life’s rarest miracles.
Then summer ended. Reality had already begun counting backwards, waiting patiently at the harbour. As the ferry sailed away, we watched each other from opposite ends, and all we could do was cry. Winter was coming for the flowers, the golden afternoons, and everything else summer had brought to life.
Despite how much we wanted it, we had discovered one of life’s cruellest paradoxes: a world overflowing with possibilities, yet not a single future that belonged to us. We were just two children — heartbroken and confused — trying to negotiate with fate, who had already made up her mind.
So, I never saw him again.
The following summer, while in New York, I tried to say hello. He never showed up. He never made it back to Nantucket either, even though it was only a forty-minute flight away.
What hurt the most was that he never really left. Every few months, another message would arrive, only to disappear into silence again. I couldn’t survive another resurrection…
So I cut the telephone line.
It took me two years to stop crying over what my heart had painted as an impossible love story… I still remember the pain in my chest. How could something invisible hurt so physically?
But life, as it always does, kept writing…
One encounter after another, one city after another, one chapter after another, I thanked God for the way it all unfolded.
I met more inspiring men.
More intelligent men.
More powerful men.
Kinder men.
I travelled further.
I wrote stories I would never otherwise have lived…
My life became richer precisely because it no longer followed the script the 21 old me version had written for it.
I was a free woman.
And so, freedom made me stronger. Wiser. Braver. Sharper. More alive. A woman far richer than the one I had almost become at twenty-one.
What once felt like the greatest tragedy slowly turned into a blessing.
Today I understand something I couldn’t have known then: I was never meant to live a traditional, predictable life. I simply didn’t know myself then.
Now that I have come to understand freedom had always been the truest part of me, I realize that life would have never been enough.
Some women are simply blessed to wander free. To build. To create. To destroy…
There is one thing I still have to admit, though…
To this day, it still is the greatest love story of my life.
But not the greatest love.
Whitney was right.
“I found the greatest love of all inside of me.”
And there was one final lesson I couldn’t possibly have understood at twenty-one.
The unknown is always far greater than everything we know.
Thank you for reliving this moment with me!
See you next Sunday at 4.
Love, Kiki