I no longer needed to suffer anymore. I no longer needed to wait for answers explanations details or some final piece of truth that would make everything make sense. I wasn’t waiting anymore. And somehow when I stopped waiting for you I finally found sleep again. Even if it was only for one night I am grateful for the release that allowed me to finally rest because there is a particular exhaustion that comes from loving someone who has become a question you can never answer.

I used to have so much love in my heart that I would cry thinking about you and today I have no tears left. They dried up somewhere between the hope and the disappointment and maybe that is because whatever love I had left also dried up with them. Maybe this is what the death of a great love actually feels like. Not hatred. Not rage. Not some beautiful final destruction. But the quiet realization that there is nothing left inside you that can keep resurrecting what has already died.

So today I am letting you go completely. I am letting our love die. Today I am no longer your friend and today you no longer are a part of me. Not because I never loved you but because I loved you enough to finally understand that I cannot keep a dead love alive simply because it was once beautiful.

And now you’ll never see me again in the way I allowed you to. You will never again have access to the woman who kept the door open for you. Who waited. Who hoped. Who believed that maybe one day you would return and we would continue the story I thought had been interrupted instead of ended. I am moving away from you forever now.

I’ll leave you with a book. Our children. And your perspective of our shared life. I’ll leave you with the memories that belong to you and whatever version of our story you choose to carry. Everything will change slowly. Parts of you will dissolve and disappear and not even I will remember that you were once the love of my life.

And perhaps that is the part that hurts the most. Not that I am leaving you but that one day the person I once loved with enough force to rearrange my entire existence will become nothing more than a name attached to a life I used to live.

But I cannot stay here. I cannot keep hope alive inside me for a love that has already taught me that I was not its final choice because if I keep even one small piece of hope for you I will spend the rest of my life making room for someone who is no longer coming home.

And if I keep that space occupied by you how will I ever find the place I am actually meant to go? How will I ever find my real love. My true love. If I continue standing at the grave of the love I thought was my forever?

I have spent so much of my life believing that being loved by you would be the greatest love story I would ever know when perhaps you were only the chapter that taught me what it means to lose myself trying to be chosen.

I was someone’s rib before I ever became someone’s wife. Someone’s mother. Someone’s lover. Someone’s heartbreak. I was created with the capacity to belong to something greater than the love I was begging to preserve.

And I am destined and determined to find my true love. Not by searching desperately for another person to replace you but by finding my first love again in myself and in my children and in the life that is still waiting for me beyond the ruins of us.

Maybe my greatest love story will not begin with another man at all. Maybe it begins with the woman who survived you. Maybe it begins with the mother who chose her children. The woman who finally chose herself. And the heart that stopped begging to be chosen by someone else.

And somewhere beyond all of this I believe there is a love meant for me that will not require me to abandon myself to keep it. A love that will choose me without hesitation. Without conditions. Without making me wonder whether I am worthy of being kept. A love that will not make me feel like I have to prove that I am someone worth coming home to.

But before I find that love I have to leave you completely. I have to let the last thread of hope between us snap because hope is a beautiful thing until it becomes a chain. And I refuse to spend another lifetime chained to the possibility of you.

So I am letting our love die here. Not because it was never beautiful but because its beauty no longer has value to me. I loved you. I loved you deeply. I loved you enough to make a home out of waiting.

But I will not make a home out of waiting anymore.

You were the love of my life and perhaps you always will be a part of the story that made me who I became but you are not the love I am taking with me into the rest of my life.

That love is mine now. It belongs to me first. It belongs to my children. And one day when I am finally ready it will belong to the greatest love story I have yet to live.

And when that day comes I will look back at this version of myself. The woman lying awake in the middle of the night. Watching time pass. Still missing you. Still loving you. Still believing we were meant to be.

And I will thank her for finally having the courage to leave.

Because she did not stop loving you because you became ugly. She stopped loving you because she finally realized that she could not keep calling something beautiful when it was slowly poisoning her.

It has not faded nor will it

Bright like our moons

I am still in love with you.

Always a Romantic. Lol

I found this is my drafts; December 15, 2021. 9:06am

I do my deepest thinking in these hours of the night when I lay here and watch time pass on and I ponder about my entire life. Usually it’s about missing you or loving you or remembering the memories we created and wondering how something that once felt so much like destiny could become something I had to learn how to bury. I would think about you and the life we made and how I would wait for you to come back to me so we could continue to make magic because I always thought we would end up back together. I thought we were meant to be. I thought some loves were written into the bones of us. The kind that could wander through years and heartbreak and still find their way home.

I thought you were the love of my life and perhaps that is why it took me so long to understand that being the love of my life did not mean you were meant to remain in it forever. There was a time when loving you felt like holding something sacred. Like I had been trusted with a piece of heaven and spent my life trying not to drop it. I would have sworn that even if the world stripped everything else from us there would always be something between us that could not die.

But love can rust. Even the most beautiful things can corrode when they are left too long in the wrong conditions. And ours did not die because it was ugly. It died because its beauty no longer looked beautiful to me. It became something I could no longer recognize without remembering everything it had cost me. Something that once tasted like honey began to taste like poison and I kept trying to convince myself that if I drank slowly enough I would remember the sweetness.