A journal entry from Jan. 11, 2022:
Maybe living life without him is simply finding a home in all the minuscule, beautifully mundane moments.
Tonight, I sat on the vomit-colored couch of my living room, all five of my roommates squeezed together like sardines. As the room filled with a magenta haze of LED glow and laughter, we passed a bowl of popcorn between us while Rick and Morty played on our tiny TV. This felt like magic.
For a moment, I felt as ripe, fresh and promising as I always believed the age of 20 would harbor.
Maybe I’m the one who must lighten the burden off my own shoulders. Wipe my own tears and whisper comforting words in my own ear. All the love I still have for him is buried within some cavern of my heart.
I feel its ache reverberating deep in my bones, five long months of a lifetime later. They say grief is love with nowhere to go: an aimless, mournful, howling ghost.
If this is the case, it seems I will be grieving for a lifetime.
But what do I know about love? Maybe this is all naive of me to say. I will probably scoff at the mention of his name in a couple years from now. I know him and all his flaws now, especially the cracks in his exterior that would doom our future. In spite of that, I’m lovesick enough to look past it all.
Now, there is a new me he doesn’t know. She is a stranger in a different city, in a different world, living a completely unimaginable life. He will never comprehend this. He will never get to lay eyes on the posters and books that decorate my room. I have an entirely new wardrobe he has never seen and new friends he has never met. He will never know the tears I shed all these months over him.
I know in my heart he will feel the loss of me for a lifetime. I used to have nothing but pure love for him, but now it’s all tangled up with the knotted thread of hurt.
I wait for the sting of heartbreak to abandon me, but will the love that remains be long gone by then too?