16. Dear You

I’ve tried to explain this ache to myself a hundred different ways.

Tried to wrap logic around it, tried to tell myself that because we couldn’t be,

I shouldn’t still feel like this.

But I do.

I do.

And if I’m honest, it’s not just that I miss you.

It’s that I don’t know what to do with everything you awakened in me.

You need to know this:

I didn’t just fall in love with you.

I built a home inside myself for the version of me that loved you.

And when we had to walk away,

I wasn’t just losing you.

I was tearing down walls I had painted with care.

I was silencing parts of myself that only ever learned to speak your name.

…

Do you know what it means

to be changed like that?

To feel yourself expand in directions you didn’t even believe in

and then have to cut yourself back down to size?

I don’t ache because we were impossible.

I ache because we were real

and still had to be impossible anyway.

I ache because I became someone I was proud to be with you,

softer, freer, wildly open.

I gave without calculation.

I loved without caution.

And that version of me?

She didn’t survive the ending.

You weren’t just a chapter.

You were the thing that shifted the axis.

You were the moment after which nothing was ever quite the same.

So don’t mistake my silence for strength.

Don’t mistake my distance for peace.

I carry you, still.

Not as longing, not as regret.

But as a wound with memory.

You were the love of my life.

The one that undid me in the most beautiful, brutal way.

And I would’ve built a life with you.

I would’ve broken every rule to keep us,

if the world had given me even the smallest chance.

But it didn’t.

So this is what I’m left with:

A version of myself I miss,

a dream I can’t live,

and a truth I will never be able to un-know.

You were it.

And we couldn’t be.

And that broke me

Still

These pieces

Are mine to carry.

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