Written in warmth

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Yesterday, I went to the sauna.
After arriving back in Belgium - snow, cold, frozen air - my body craved heat. Not comfort. Heat.
The kind that melts what the mind refuses to touch.

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The past days, I have had so much to say… and yet, so little to write.
It felt as if the story had already left my body - written out through sweat, through silence, through walking in the snow.
As if the weight on my shoulders had finally found its way down, into the earth.

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Some parts no longer need attention.
Because words are fleeting - actions are not.
And when actions speak clearly enough, the story closes itself.

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What can still be written belongs to a chapter in a book called “Echoes of Her”.
Nothing more than a loose end of history, no longer asking to be pulled.

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What matters now is not what went wrong -
but where it brought me.

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What I learned.

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For a moment, I believed that two women could be practical.
And in many ways, it is.
Women think alike when it comes to household rhythms, daily structure, logistics, details, efficiency.
There is understanding without explanation.
There is flow without negotiation.

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And yet…
I often felt the need to retreat.
To distance myself from emotions that were not mine to carry.

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There is a reason balance exists between masculine and feminine energy.
The role of the masculine is not only to provide materially,
but to hold emotional space -
to ground, to stabilize, to support the feminine in her creative, emotional, cyclical nature.

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That balance was missing.

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Drama - and I do not mean acting or chaos -
but the emotional waves, the hormonal tides of a woman, are not to be underestimated.
We move through entire inner worlds every single month.
Worlds a man will never fully understand - but can hold.

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You can support your friends up to a point.
But you cannot give away all your space to emotionally regulate another adult.

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There were days - especially in deep exhaustion -
when I simply had no room left.
I needed to deal with my own shit.
And that was already more than enough.

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That boundary was not seen.
Not accepted.
Not respected.

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And that, for me, is a non-negotiable.

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I once promised myself: never again toxicity, no matter how subtle, no matter how well disguised.

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At the same time, I found myself stepping into masculine roles -
carrying not only emotional weight, but literal weight.
Fixing. Lifting. Solving. Providing.
Dealing with everyone’s shit - figuratively and quite literally.

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In public spaces, my presence was often overridden.
I was interrupted.
My voice cut off.
Because visibility mattered.
Because being seen mattered more than balance.

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There was no reciprocity.
No energetic equality.
Perhaps - somewhere - there was competition.
Who gets to stay in her femininity?
And who compensates for the imbalance?

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I realized something uncomfortable but deeply true:

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Living with “a very kind best friend”
is not the same as living in a healthy, balanced relationship -
not in a woman - woman dynamic,
not in a man - woman dynamic,
not even in friendship.

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I will never settle for less.
But I will also never again confuse companionship with partnership.

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A “practical relationship” is not the solution.
Balance is.

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This realization reaches far beyond one story, one friendship, one chapter.
In our current society, it would be a painful mirror -
and a hard kick against many comfortable illusions.

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I do not need to explain what went wrong.
Details are irrelevant.
What matters is what I learned.

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And what I know now, without doubt:

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I am done shrinking my needs.
I am done overcompensating imbalance.
I am done calling survival love.

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Some lessons arrive quietly.
Others leave through sweat, snow, and silence.

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And once they are integrated -
they never ask to be repeated.

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"This was never a love story, but a friendship that taught me everything about balance."

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