To this day, I’m still glad you never hurt as bad as I did.
It’s true, I mean I never hurt you for a reason. I loved you. I still do. I never wanted to see you in any sort of pain, let alone for me to be the cause because it broke my heart to see anything but a smile on your face.
It’s been a while now and I am well aware I am still in love with you. Not with what we had or who either of us used to be. I’m very much still in love with you because after speaking to you for the first time in a long time for about 10 minutes, it didn’t hurt. It didn’t hurt because your presence filled my soul with light and I felt a warmth I had so long been without. I felt myself falling in love with you again. Just like that. Then I realized I just had a taste of the love for you that never left my soul.
You dismembered my heart into so many tiny pieces of cherished moments that, in the blink of an eye, became only memories. I wondered how it was still possible to feel anything at all. But I guess that’s just how well I loved you. My love for you is resilient and it is timeless. It burns with passion and burns my soul, but at this point, I’ve learned that the love I have learned to live with is that of the life of a phoenix: It will tragically burn and crumble but rise from the ashes with renewed strength and a fiercely limitless measure of hope.
I used to be terrified of heights, literally and metaphorically, until I realized just how much scarier it was to think of never flying. So I’ve decided to love. To just stop telling myself I can’t love someone who doesn’t love me because well, I do. I feel lighter now having declared this to myself. To just let you fade, hopefully. I have been pinned beneath the ceiling of a finite sky when I was told I would not live to feel it’s limits and the skin of the once brightly burning stars has begun to peel. That is how long it feels I have loved and will love you.
I have stopped aching in my day-to-day life, but there is a void I have filled with fragments of the life I have had to build during your eternal absence. I love myself, which is something I should have truly done much sooner, but even after I have learned, I still love you the same and sometimes I argue if I love you more.
My heartache is no longer a self-pity. It is another reason for me to love myself because I know never to doubt how I really feel by pressuring it with hesitation or contemplation. Heartache is a quality of myself I always had and finally grew into learning how to handle. I knew from the moment I met you that I loved you and would never want to let you go. And here I am living a very full life without you, but still feeling the exact same way: that you were wrong about us. And I always knew I was better off with you because I am and always have been a person I am very proud to be. No man will change that. But believing I have been right about losing the great love of my life is something I know very well is seemingly naive, but again, only I can judge myself for that. Being left behind by the one person you love so much is the perfect way to know how it feels to die while still breathing. I haven’t won, but neither have you. I’m not sure if I have truly lost, and I doubt you’re sure too.