Now I Love Myself More Than I Ever Loved You

My heart has perked up upon letting your image wander back into my thoughts. It’s been forever, or at least it feels that way. Have the seasons already cycled through twice since the first time we met? There was a fire between us. Instantly we connected that night, and we proved that connection in the best way we knew how- physically.

I have no regrets that our love story began that way. We connected tangibly, and I hoped it would be a matter of time until our minds and spirits followed suit. You found a home inside of me, and I thought my happiest breaths were inhaled while intertwined with you.

I let myself love you.

But you did not love me.

As I lay awake, envisioning our love in rosy hues, you saw me in muted grays and browns. You liked me, I know you did. You tolerated me, you were amused by me, you were attracted to me. But you did not feel the passionate blaze I felt for you. You did not have the selfless yearning to please me the way I did for you.

So I started to fall out of love with myself.

You never called me pretty, and I started to doubt my own beauty. You never called me dazzling nor brilliant nor inspiring, and the light drained from my eyes.

Instead, you called me crazy, masking it a term of endearment. You called me cool and nice and ok. You constricted your tongue to mediocrity and I believed it all. I folded myself into smaller and smaller pieces, until I was finally the size of the minute being you thought me to be.

I shrunk smaller and smaller until I could no longer restrain my natural vigor.

I began to be dazzling and brilliant and inspiring. I deflected all the wasted love I had for you back to myself. As my heart drained itself of the poison your plainness had injected, it refueled on bright golden and crimson sparks, the colors of passion.

I treated myself with tenderness and care, just as I had always longed for you to do. I showed myself a deeper affection than you were ever capable of.

And as I fell more in love with myself, I fell out of love with you. You, the boy who had been my north star. The boy who synchronously gave me everything and nothing. The boy who did not destroy me all at once, but instead took pieces and pieces of me away until I was a mangled skeleton of myself.

I am in love with myself. You may have been my love once, but you are most definitely my love-no-longer.