Two Years Later: Letting You Go (Finally)

B,

They want me to say I hate you. They want me to say that you’re a liar and a gaslighter and a f*ckboy and a selfish a**hole and a bad person. And maybe you are. I don’t know anymore. I’ve become far too unreliable a narrator to make those calls.

But, even if you are, you are also so much more than that. And I don’t know how to make myself hate the guy that they all see you as when I am still so in love with the guy who waited to make sure I got to my car safely and who always opened the door for me and who never forgot to text to make sure I got home okay and who talked to his mom with more respect and patience than I’d ever seen before. How do I hate the guy who never let me get away with shutting him out when I was upset and who always wanted to talk it out and who could make me laugh without even trying and who never pushed me to go further than I was ready for but who also challenged me to be better and braver always?

I won’t delude myself into thinking you were perfect; nobody is perfect and maybe you were further from it than I’m ready to admit. But you were perfect to me, and maybe for me, and I hate that you couldn’t see in yourself what I saw in you from the first moment.

I fought so hard for you, and maybe I shouldn't have had to, but I thought you were so worth it. And I think you thought I might’ve been worth it too, but whatever happened to you in your past made you believe you were undeserving of my love and so you sabotaged us before you could be proven right. I can understand that better than anyone.

I think you were too scared to let yourself feel the feelings that I know you felt for me because you knew I would mean something different, that we would’ve been something real, and you weren’t prepared for that. You were so blinded by your own insecurities that you pushed away someone who accepted you and loved you exactly as you were, someone who only ever wanted to spend time with you, when what you should’ve been doing instead was fighting against your past for me too.

That still doesn’t make what you did to me okay and it sure as hell doesn’t make it hurt any less, but it is what it is.

The reality is: you traumatized me.

You forced me to let my guard down for the first time in my life and I did it because you were different. I willingly fought against every instinct I have—every instinct that told me to run before I got rejected, that told me I wasn’t pretty enough or funny enough or outgoing enough or sexy enough to be the object of someone’s affection—the way I wish you would’ve fought against your own past for me, only to have you, what, change your mind?

I asked you to make me hate you and I know that is the only reason you told me that you didn’t have feelings for me anymore. Because you don’t do Eskimo kisses with someone you don’t have feelings for and you don’t kiss them on the forehead and you don’t sing, really badly, in the car with them and you definitely don’t introduce them to your parents after only a couple weeks. And those feelings don’t just disappear overnight.

I know those things to be true, but I also know that none of it matters because you didn’t want to put in the effort to keep me. There is a big difference between wanting to and not trying and wanting to and making the best effort you can at that time, and I’m still learning how to give that statement the weight it deserves.

Because you simply didn’t want to.

I understand that you had your own issues—we’re all a little f*cked up from our past, believe me—but all I ever wanted was for you to show me you were trying, the way I was trying. Why couldn’t we, two equally broken people, have tried together?

You were always braver over the phone than you ever were face to face, and even then you were still a coward. Even on my very worst day, did I deserve everything you did to me? I gave you so many opportunities to walk away, but you never wanted to take them. How was I supposed to know when it was time to stop fighting for you when all the times before you made me feel brave and told me not to be scared? How was I supposed to prepare myself for you to walk away when you worked so hard to make me believe that you never would?

I wish more than anything that you had thought this through before you let me, and I let myself, fall in love with you. I hope you think it through next time. I hope you think of me when you finally meet the girl who you let yourself love the way I deserved to be loved by you, because I know I will be thinking of you when I meet the guy who loves me the way that I loved you. You are one of the good ones, no matter how hard they try to convince me otherwise, and I hope that you meet someone someday who makes you believe how special and rare you are, the way I couldn’t. I want that for both of us.

I’d like to think I want you this badly because I’m stubborn and I don’t like to lose or fail at anything, and not because I genuinely want someone who couldn’t muster even the smallest scrap of respect for me to just be honest. But even still, you are my greatest failure and my most painful mistake. I know I deserve better than what you gave me, so why are you still the only thing that I can imagine wanting like this?

They say this isn’t going to last forever, but it is. It may not hurt on this level forever and I may not think about you as often as I do now forever, but whatever you and I were is forever.

You took a part of me that I can never get back and you left a piece of yourself with me that I can never give away. I will always be a little bit yours and you will always be a little bit mine. You are a part of me now, and I both love and hate that fact, and I’m still trying to reconcile what that says about me.

I thought we really were forever. Maybe not romantically, probably not romantically actually, but I thought we would be in each other’s lives forever. You were the kind of person that I wanted to be friends with before I wanted anything else; you give off the kind of energy that people just want to be around. And yet you did everything you could to make sure we’d see each other as little as possible, to make sure we never stood a chance, and then you just walked away without a backwards glance.

So I guess this is the version of forever with you that I’m going to have to learn to live with.

A forever where, one day, all the sad songs will no longer be about you. A forever where I won’t be plagued by the fact that, as hard as I've tried to, I can’t remember our last kiss; where I will someday forget that I once knew the drive to your house like the back of my hand. A forever where passing the exit on the highway that leads to you won’t have me in tears and the mention of your name won’t have me spiralling for days afterwards. A forever where I know that I did absolutely everything I could and nothing I might’ve done would’ve changed this outcome.

A forever where I will eventually believe that our story is finally done.

I wanted your love more than I’ve ever wanted anything, but I will be better without it.

Yours,

F