*Warning: salty language ahead!

Here I sit, with my heart in my lap.

The silence has stretched on for weeks between us, and I’m told through the grapevine that you have moved on.

You don’t think I deserved a text, a call, a heads up that all we shared was now finally behind us, some words of comfort that would have brought me an ounce of closure?

I don’t blame you, and I don’t hate you anymore either. And fuck, did I despise you when every reality sunk into my heart and soul; all the things I had been avoiding for months came to claim its truth. I cursed you, with venom, speaking to the gods as if they would listen and not pity this sweet fool.

But hate is how we hold on, and I’d like to keep the good things we shared locked away in my heart—another memory that, in a few years time, will be destined for feel foreign, far removed from the woman I used to be because that’s how it goes, doesn’t it?

We fall in love, have our hearts broken, and pick our sorry asses up off the floor, and we change all the things we know have been hurting us, hindering us, keeping us stagnant until we look back and wonder how something that once felt so brutal no longer feels like anything.

Pain dissipates, time does heal all wounds, and like the song bellows, now you’re just somebody that I used to know.

Why am I writing this? I know you’ll never see it, but where else will the words I will never have a chance to say go? They go into my craft, they spill onto a blank page, and with them every hope I ever had for us.

Call me naïve because there was always a part of me that believed in us, all that we could be, and maybe hope was the signal, the beggar, I chose to trust. Faith is what we never had, and faith is a friend, a confidante, a healer, and a giver.

There are days now that feel unbearable in my longing for you still. Longing to kiss your lips, longing for your eyes to look at me with the desire I had become so accustomed to—all the while knowing that she now feels what I crave.

Is this healthy? Fuck no; it’s torturous, it’s devilish, it’s soul crushing, but I knew, didn’t I? You had warned me from the very start. But if I could go back, would I? Would I take all those nights and change them, save myself from the hurt and the pain?

I wouldn’t, just so you know. I wouldn’t have done a single fucking thing differently.

I would have watched us crash and burn again, and maybe there is a part of me that finds excitement in the destruction; maybe rejection was my high, and maybe, just fucking maybe, there was a lesson in there for me—one that only I could claim.

Love yourself, they (including myself) sprout lyrically and righteously. They’re fucking right—because when you love someone more than you love yourself, you lose every good thing about yourself. You become a shell of a person, sustained only by the dark, and losing more and more of the joy of being the light.

This is dark, love.

And as I have learnt over my many years of wandering this earth, the dark demands its place. It demands the sacrifice of who you were.

This is how you feel pain, this is how you process it—you fucking sit in it. You reminisce on every goddamn detail of what was so that it no longer haunts you, or keeps you trapped in these often vicious cycles we found ourselves in.

Do you want to know the worst part of it all?

I still only wish for your happiness, even though it requires my absence. And that’s how I know that I loved you, not the farcical, fickle kind of love, but truly, deeply, and with great affection.

And as I sit with my heart in my lap, enveloped in dark thoughts and hurt, I find myself back with faith, which I strayed from with you, and I know that everything is going to be alright.

Hearted by and 5 other readers

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