A letter to a realist, from a romantic!

To be a romantic is to walk through life with a crown of fire and a heart made of glass. It is both a curse and a coronation. You feel too much, love too deeply, grieve too sharply, yet in that very vulnerability lies a secret power.

I have seen the bee drown in honey. Sweetness can be fatal, and yet I cannot resist the intoxication of it. Of course I know the dangers, how a heart like mine can be broken by the mere indifference of another, how the ecstasy of devotion so easily sharpens into despair. And yet, I return. Again and again. Because to be a romantic is not a choice; it is an instinct, a pulse, a way of being stitched into the fabric of my soul. I can take any person, any passing stranger, any accidental presence and lift them into the stratosphere of my imagination. I can write a love story around them so vivid that the mere act of their existence becomes my cathedral. If they breathe, I worship. If they smile, I collapse into prayer. Even in their absence, I weave them into constellations and live in the glow of their imagined light.

But reality is merciless. Reality is not built for dreamers. While I stand under a velvet sky thick with trembling stars, sipping lavender potion from the air, they stand under concrete ceilings, measuring their breath in practicality. They do not sway when I sway, do not shiver when I shiver. They anchor themselves to earth while I dissolve into ether.

And that hurts. Gosh! how it hurts!

Because when you live as a romantic, pain is not just pain, it is a full orchestration. Grief moves in like a storm, painting over the sunlight, draining the flavor from food, flattening the whole world into gray. One careless word, one indifferent glance, can collapse entire universes I’ve built. The heart turns traitor, bleeding into every corner of my reality. And yet, there is a strange sovereignty in this wound. To feel everything is to possess a palette denied to the realists. They live in monochrome, I in kaleidoscope, even if the colors sometimes burn my eyes.

I have been this way since childhood. Perhaps because reality, in its plainness, felt too heavy, too ordinary. I learned early how to stitch together fantasies where I could be radiant, cherished, alive in a way the waking world never allowed. I have always been the queen of my own Bridgerton, the author of my private fairy tales, the architect of invisible kingdoms. And still, as I grew, I realized this was not merely an escape but an inheritance. A gift. To romanticize is not to lie, it is to see more. To glimpse beauty in the ordinary, to transform banality into poetry. To take the raw materials of existence, coffee cups, train rides, casual conversations and spin them into golden threads. I do not just live life; I gild it.

But even this alchemy does not cure the ache.

There is something deeper, a longing older than memory. It feels as though my soul has been exiled from a gentler world, a world not made of deadlines and decimals but of silk skies and trembling galaxies. I carry a homesickness for a place I have never touched, yet know intimately. A homesickness not for land or language but for stars. That is what it means, I think, to be a romantic. To move through life half-broken, half-divine, carrying in your chest both a wound and a lantern. To know the world was not built to contain your tenderness, and yet to give it anyway. To spill honey even when it drowns you, to scatter stardust even when no one notices, to love even when love is impossible.

It is madness, yes. But it is also the most powerful feeling in existence.

Because the realist may survive, but the romantics, they thrive!