She Walks In Starlight

I began seeing the truth hiding in the words of others. Fellow writers. Anonymous messages. Uninvited honesty delivered straight to a heart that was still learning how to read.

And looking back now?

Painfully accurate doesn’t even begin to cover it.

He summarized me—us—the time we spent tangled together,like I was barely three sentences…three small lines in a journal he was already done writing in.

Before I realized I was the story being erased, oh how I was hanging on to him with everything I had. I thought I was misunderstanding love, friendship, promises and what it meant to matter to someone. But I see it clearly now:

I didn’t misunderstand love.

I MISUNDERSTOOD HIM.

Because he taught me that a broken heart and broken promises feel identical, that hope can bruise deeper than rejection, and that the end of us was written long before the beginning ever started.

To me I was more than the three lines he summed us up to.

The book was about something didn’t know yet would be that of heartbreak and false promises are two separate languages; and that he was fluent in both.

I was forced to learn a dialect of hurt I never asked to speak, and only years later can I finally translate the words he was too afraid to say out loud:

1. “I called her and maybe I should never have. I gave her hope I shouldn’t have.”

Translation: I liked the comfort of you missing me, but not the responsibility of loving you back.

2. “She loved me with all she had and she has a great body, but we wouldn’t have worked out in the long run.”

Translation: You were enough to look at, enough to touch, but never enough to choose.

3. “She thinks she understands me and wants to be in my life, but she isn’t the one I want or need anymore. I just don’t know how to tell her.”

Translation: You saw depth in me I never had the courage to live up to. You loved me despite the coward I was.

And the wildest part?

I spent years thinking I was the one who didn’t get it. Turns out, I understood everything.I just couldn’t understand why I was begging to be kept by someone who was already letting me go.

I was trying to read a story written in a language I hadn’t learned yet even though the translation was sitting in my hands the entire time. Now I know better than to keep trying to decode something that refuses to make sense.

Not because love is confusing, but because I know now to never keep trying to read something I don’t understand.

Maybe it means I’ll settle in life, or maybe it means my greatest love is still waiting to be written.

Either way?

The next chapter is mine to choose.

And I finally speak the language of letting go

You didn’t just hurt me. You changed the entire way I move through the world.
Sometimes I look back and I can’t believe how deeply I let you in, how much of myself I handed over without even realizing what I was losing. It’s like you left this quiet wreckage inside me, and I’ve been trying to rebuild around it ever since.

Everyone who came after you… they walked into a heart that was already struggling to trust, already bracing for impact. I compared them to you, not because you were some great love, but because the damage you left became my reference point. Back then, I didn’t know what toxic looked like. I didn’t know what love was supposed to feel like. I only knew the ache you trained me to expect.

And what devastates me the most is that part of me is still tied to the idea of you the version I created to survive the reality. The version I wanted so desperately to believe in. I still catch myself reaching for that ghost, measuring people against something that never actually existed. It’s exhausting. It’s heartbreaking. And it’s humiliating to admit.

You tainted so much for me without even knowing it. You made me doubt myself. You made me think love was something I had to chase, something I had to earn, something I had to bend and break for. And even now, years later, I’m still dealing with the fallout. Still trying to understand why the thought of you can still hit so hard when you’re long gone.

Sometimes I wonder if you ruined me for anyone else, not because you were extraordinary, but because I’m still healing from the way you made me feel so small, so unseen, so easy to leave behind. And the saddest part is realizing how long I’ve carried a love that was never real, while the damage you left behind has been painfully real this whole time

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