I Don’t Have To Get Over You To Let You Go

I don’t have to get over you to let you go, or at least try to convince myself that I’m getting there, because both you and I know that I’m not even close. I don’t want to wait for our memories to turn into nightmares I’d rather forget, nor do I have to wait for the remaining love I have for you to be fully exhausted. You know that I feed off my emotions, the very reason why I’m terrified to keep holding on to ideas of you, of us, and of our lost love. I’m scared that if I keep doing so, I would keep denying myself the chance to discern that other emotions exist, better emotions I believe I deserve, apart from both the longing and loneliness you’ve stabbed me with.

It would be hypocritical to say that I don’t want anything to do with you anymore, deceitful to say that I don’t love you just as much—you know I still do. What I don’t want to keep dealing with is the emotional torture I feel from the thoughts of what you have done to me, what you have made of me, what you have left me with. You turned me into who I didn’t desire or expect to be. You convinced me that I should be content and settle with how you made me feel, like I had no right to demand to be treated with how I deserve to be loved and to be cared for. Worse is that you made me lose the remaining sanguine parts of myself, ones I strived so hard to build, to save me when everything else fails.

I would not deny that I had a part to play with the pain I currently endure caused by the failure of our once perfect story. Accepting too little, believing that “little” is all I deserved, convincing myself that the tiniest of things you did were grand because I loved you way too much that I chose to overlook your lies. I thought the little gestures of love were more than enough for me to turn a blind eye and just forgive you for all the mistakes you made, yet they were not. I was just too consumed by the love only I knew existed; I finally know better.

I learned and I keep learning that love solely is not enough to make anything work. Love is where good things blossom. Having only the feeling of love toward someone isn’t sufficient to sustain any healthy and progressive relationship. There should also be hope, trust, faith, and commitment. I know that deciding to let go of you does not equate to my love fading; it’s still very much like a blazing fire waiting to be put out. Deciding to let go of you means preparing myself for the next chapter of my life, allowing myself to move forward, moving past the agony and the hate, letting myself heal to feel that I deserve to love and to be loved again.

“Let things go. Release them. Detach yourself from them. Stop turning on your emotional television to watch the same program over and over again, the one that shows how much you suffered from a certain loss: that is only poisoning you, nothing else.” — Paulo Coelho