part time soulmate, full time problem

It's been 102 days since I left someone who was incredibly important to me. I guess it's your typical story- we met online, got closer than ever, and then I was told that she wouldn't ever be able to meet me in person.

Okay, maybe that last part wasn't quite so typical.

Took me a while to figure out that she was terrified of intimacy and commitment. Mental illness and trauma are funny like that. I have reason to believe that... she never actually wanted anything real.

I was the perfect fantasy. A fever dream, according to her. I was a bit like a love interest in one of her books. That is to say- I was purely fictional. As long as I stayed behind a screen, I didn't have to be real. That's why she needed to make sure we'd never meet. All of this has left me questioning my own sense of reality.

And I suppose... I've long since stopped grieving for the loss of her. I'm not sure what it is that I'm still grieving for. The hope for a better future, the way I felt with her, my own warmth, the illusion of her...? She was like a mirror. Who I saw in her and who she told me she was might not have been her at all.

The most painful thing about this is that... she was the first person who'd ever made me feel like I was lovable. Like I was worth something. It completely shattered the lie I was telling myself: That no matter how hard I tried, I'd never be good for anyone. That my mind would never be safe for anyone else, let alone me.

I know that I can't hold onto her. But I want to hang onto the hope that all the things that happened... might have shocked my system so much that I'll finally be able to leave a decade of depression behind me. She's forced me to face myself. And it crushes me to think that she might run away from herself forever.

I've realized that... I'd been trying to cope through fiction all these years. But now that I myself became a mere fiction in somebody else's head, I don't think I can keep escaping into fiction. I don't want to escape. It feels like my brain just rejects anything it deems 'not real enough'. I want to live.

Call me insane, but I've started learning her language. It's hard to explain, but... even though it's her language, I can't bring myself to fully associate it with her. I've never met her, I've never heard her speak the language and... it's not like I actually knew the real her. When I think of the language, I get reminded of my own feelings. Of how it feels like to be hopeful for the future. I want to make that feeling a part of myself. I want to overwrite the bad feelings with that hope I was so desperately clinging to. I'll tie it to myself so I won't lose it.