My Notes on The Folded Page by Gia Chanshalani | A Poetry Review on One Sided Love and Healing

There are some books you read to understand something.
There are some books you read to feel less alone.

The Folded Page felt like the second kind.

This is not loud poetry. It does not try to shock you or impress you with complexity. It feels like reading thoughts someone wrote down at night when they could not pretend to be strong anymore.

What stayed with me the most was the idea of living in a soft delusion. There is a line that speaks about that space where you know something is not real, yet you allow yourself to sit in it for a while. And I paused there.

Because do we not all do that.

We know when someone is not choosing us. We understand silence. We see inconsistency. Yet the heart creates its own version of events. For a few minutes we imagine reciprocation. We imagine conversations that never happened. We blur reality with hope because hope feels kinder.

The beautiful part is that the poet does not shame this. She does not treat it as foolish. She treats it as human.

That gentleness is what makes this book special.

The emotional journey in this collection feels very honest. Love does not arrive in a dramatic way. It begins quietly. You do not even realise what you are feeling at first. Then slowly you understand. Then you accept your own emotions. Then expectations begin to grow without you noticing. Then the imagined world starts forming. Then reality begins to knock. After that comes the back and forth in your own mind. You replay moments. You question yourself. You hold on and let go in the same breath.

And somewhere in between all of this, you feel tired.

The book captures that exhaustion. The emotional draining that comes from loving deeply and not being met with the same intensity. It captures the slow acceptance that this love might be one sided. Not because you were not enough, but because it simply was not meant to be shared in the way you hoped.

Reading it made me go back to a version of myself I do not talk about often. The version that waited. The version that created stories in her head. The version that believed that maybe tomorrow would be different.

What I appreciated most about Gia Chanshalani’s writing is the vulnerability. In a world where most of us are guarded, not because we are fake but because we have learnt to be careful, this kind of emotional openness feels rare. The poetry is lyrical and subtle. It feels confessional without feeling dramatic. It allows you to sit with your own feelings without forcing a conclusion.

The title makes more sense the more you think about it. When you fold a page in a book, it means something mattered. It means you want to return to that part. This collection feels like something I would open again on a quiet night when I want to reconnect with my emotions. Not because I want to hurt again, but because I want to remember that I once felt deeply.

After finishing the book, I did not feel broken. I felt validated. It reminded me that emotional chaos is not unique to me. Many people go through the same cycle of attachment, illusion, disappointment, and healing. It reminded me that loving someone from the deepest part of your heart and then accepting that the love is not returned is painful, but it is also transformative. You lose something, but you also find yourself.

This is a book I would recommend to someone who is currently navigating one sided love. I would also recommend it to someone who has already healed but still carries a soft memory in a corner of their heart. It does not promise dramatic closure. It offers quiet understanding.

And sometimes that is enough.