Would you even recognize these words as mine?
I still love you.
I just don’t want to be with you.
I want you to be happy.
I don’t hate you.
Sometimes love remains, even when the relationship doesn’t.
Healing can come with anger.
Not the kind that wants revenge, but the kind that finally understands.
Sometimes you look back and realize how much of your personality was built around surviving an environment you should never have had to survive. How many decisions were actually fear disguised as choice. How many relationships were shaped by the need to be accepted, needed, loved, or not abandoned.
Eventually, you start noticing the patterns.
You notice how you tolerated things you once would have walked away from. How you became quieter. More accommodating. More afraid of disappointing people. How slowly, without realizing it, you stopped asking what you wanted.
And there can be a strange kind of grief in realizing that.
But there can also be freedom.
The past explains who you became. It does not get to decide who you become next.
There is no requirement to keep repeating yesterday simply because yesterday taught you how to survive.
Every day offers another choice.
A boundary.
A pause.
A different response.
A person you choose not to let influence you.
A life you finally begin building according to your own values.
Maybe healing isn’t becoming the person you were before everything happened.
Maybe it’s becoming someone who finally gets to choose who they are without fear making the decision first.
What happened is history.
It doesn’t have to remain the present.
And it certainly doesn’t have to become the future.
There are things you said to me that I don’t think you ever understood the weight of.
I remember them—not because I want to hold them against you forever, but because some words don’t disappear when the argument ends. They stay with you. They become part of the things you have to heal from.
What hurts most is that I cared about you so deeply.
I wasn’t giving you pieces of myself because I didn’t care about myself. I was giving because I loved you. I kept trying to meet you where you were, to understand your fears, to reassure you, to forgive, to explain, to start over, to believe in us even when things were falling apart.
I kept extending myself farther and farther.
And I don’t think you ever truly understood how far I was stretching.
You saw the things I didn’t do. You saw the moments when I couldn’t give anymore. You saw my exhaustion as distance, my need for space as rejection, and my breaking point as proof that I didn’t love you enough.
But you didn’t always see what came before it.
You didn’t see how many times I had already emptied myself trying to keep us together.
You didn’t see what it cost me to keep showing up when I was already at my lowest.
There were moments when I was struggling just to hold myself together, and somehow I was still trying to carry the weight of your emotions too.
I was trying to be your comfort while I needed comfort.
I was trying to reassure you while I was afraid.
I was trying to hold onto us while I was barely holding onto myself.
And when I finally couldn’t do it anymore, I wish you could have understood that it wasn’t because I suddenly stopped caring.
I was depleted.
There is a difference.
I wish you could have heard the things underneath my silence.
“I’m tired.”
“I’m hurting.”
“I don’t know how much more I can carry.”
“I need you to understand me instead of asking me to prove myself again.”
And some of the things you said when you were angry hurt especially deeply because they came from the person whose words mattered so much to me.
When you questioned my love, my loyalty, my intentions, or made me feel as though everything I had given you somehow wasn’t enough, it cut deeper than you probably realized.
Because I knew how much I had given.
I knew the nights I stayed.
The chances I gave.
The forgiveness.
The patience.
The emotional energy.
The parts of myself I stretched beyond what was healthy because I wanted us to work.
And yet somehow, when I reached my limit, it felt as though all of that disappeared in your eyes.
As though the one moment I couldn’t give more erased everything I had already given.
That was painful.
I never needed you to keep score of what I did for you.
I needed you to see me.
I needed you to understand that I wasn’t an endless source of love, patience, reassurance, forgiveness, and strength.
I was a person.
And I was hurting.
There were things I did that hurt you, too. I know that. I don’t want to rewrite our story as though I was perfect and you were the only one who caused pain.
But I also can’t erase my experience just because I loved you.
I can acknowledge where I failed you while still acknowledging where I was wounded.
Both things can be true.
And perhaps the hardest truth for me is that I loved you enough to keep overextending myself long after something inside me was begging me to stop.
I kept thinking that if I explained myself one more time, loved you a little harder, gave a little more, forgave one more thing, or tried one more time, maybe you would finally understand what I was trying so desperately to give you.
But eventually I realized something heartbreaking:
There is a point where giving more doesn’t create understanding. It only creates more of yourself to lose.
And I had already lost too much of myself.
I don’t want you to read this and think I’m saying that you never loved me.
I believe you did.
That’s part of what makes all of this so complicated.
I believe there was real love between us.
But love doesn’t automatically make a relationship safe.
Love doesn’t erase the damage caused by anger, fear, accusations, or words spoken in moments when neither of us knew how to reach each other.
And loving you didn’t make me responsible for carrying everything.
I wish you had understood that when I finally stepped back, I wasn’t saying, “You don’t matter to me.”
I was saying, “I have to matter to me, too.”
I wish I had understood that sooner.
Because I cared about you.
God, I cared.
And that’s why it hurt so much to realize that no matter how much I gave, I could not give enough to make you understand what it was costing me.
I could not love you into feeling secure.
I could not sacrifice myself into making our relationship peaceful.
And I could not keep proving my love by destroying myself in the process.
So when you remember me, I hope you don’t only remember the times I fell short.
I hope you remember the woman who kept trying.
The woman who loved you when things were beautiful and when they were incredibly difficult.
The woman who gave more than you probably ever knew.
And I hope someday you understand that when I finally had nothing left to give, it wasn’t because I had stopped loving you.
It was because I had finally reached the point where I had to stop giving away pieces of myself just to keep us alive.
I loved you.
But I was at my lowest.
And I needed someone to notice that I was drowning, not ask me why I wasn’t swimming harder.
We were a fire
that did not know how to die—
only how to change its shape.
Once, we burned so fiercely
the whole horizon seemed to glow,
two wild flames bending toward one another,
feeding on heat, hunger,
and every word we could not survive without.
Then came the ash.
The quiet.
The distance where the fire
pretended it had forgotten our names.
But beneath the gray,
one coal would breathe—
and suddenly the ocean would catch fire again.
We became tide and flame,
leaving, returning,
breaking apart only to find
some invisible current
pulling us back toward shore.
Again.
And again.
Until love became a storm-tossed vessel,
beautiful from a distance,
but taking on water from within.
I loved you enough
to mistake the burning for warmth.
And I feared you enough
to finally reach for the sea
and drown the flame myself.
Not because the love was gone—
but because the fire
had begun to consume the house
we kept calling home.
So I crushed the embers
beneath my own hands.
Still—
some nights,
I swear the ashes remember.
Somewhere beneath the broken pieces,
beneath the salt,
beneath the gold I poured
into every fracture,
the coals remain.
And my heart aches
not because I want the fire back—
but because I remember
how brightly
we once burned
I have global dysmotility and life has been hellacious. I see a surgeon next week. Has anyone had this type of diagnosis and what does it look like with life in general.
It’s criminal how much I miss you. I hope one day my mind will quit replaying everything. I don’t even trust what my mind replays anymore because I know I keep forgetting the awful things we both did.
I am sure you have moved on by now; but I am still learning to heal. I don’t think you realize what you did to me. Everyone who knows me knows how screwed up I have been because of you. I am trying to do better and the moments I need to I make them Oscar-worthy.
Just know I’ll always love you.