The Day You Left Me, I Stopped Loving Myself

I had convinced myself that a decaying relationship which was essentially non-existent was something that I had to settle for, because the pain of you exiting my life terrified me.

By

Unsplash, Jeffrey Wegrzyn
Unsplash, Jeffrey Wegrzyn

What I hate about heartbreak is the fact that it leaves me with a blurry vision of what my life will be like. I’m not sure when your name will leave my head. I’m not sure when I will be okay. I’m not sure whether I ever will be okay.

I have so many unanswered questions. Questions that I’ll never have the answers to. Did I love you too much? Was I not funny enough? Did you miss your ex-girlfriend? Did you hate all of our arguments?

Maybe it’s better not knowing. But the uncertainty that this breakup has left me with is unsettling and makes me anxious. When I look at our old photos, I ask myself when it all went wrong. Was there a day you woke up and decided to stop loving me? Did you meet someone else and realize she was the type of girl you wanted instead of me?

The more I ask myself these questions, the more I realize that all I am doing is making myself feel even worse about who I am as a person.

I stopped loving myself when you broke up with me. I didn’t think I was worthy of ever being loved again.

When you stopped laughing at my jokes, I thought that I wasn’t funny. When I made an effort to call you, you’d end the phone call after five minutes, because you were ‘sleepy.’ When I watched you talk to your friends, you made me feel like I shouldn’t have been there.

You made me feel like you had to ‘settle’ for me and that you couldn’t leave the relationship. The worst part was that I didn’t need you to tell me that you didn’t love me. I knew. All you had to do was to look at me with that cold stare, with those empty eyes.

I knew I had loved you too much when I would make excuses for you hurting me.

The emotions that this heartbreak brings me is a roller-coaster. One minute, I’ll be laughing with my family and will be optimistic about my future. The next minute, I’ll sit on the toilet, crying my eyes out and using toilet paper to absorb my tears.

No matter how hard I may try to stop crying, it won’t happen. I’m an emotional wreck and that’s absolutely okay with me.

One day, you’ll miss me. You’ll miss the waffles I would bring you every morning for breakfast. You’ll miss hearing my family laugh at your annoying jokes. You’ll miss the music that I would send you.

You’ll miss me when you realize that I was the only one who stuck around when no one else did.

Maybe I loved a little bit too hard. But I don’t have much to lose if I’m losing someone who could never make time for me. Someone who couldn’t love me. Someone who lied to me.

I’d convinced myself that you were busy and had valid excuses for not seeing me. I convinced myself that you only wanted to see me once a month, because otherwise, we’d get sick of each other. I convinced myself that it was fine for you to be friends with a lot of girls from your work and call them endlessly, because it was important for your ‘future career.’

I had convinced myself that a decaying relationship which was essentially non-existent was something that I had to settle for, because the pain of you exiting my life terrified me.

When you told me you were fed up, I fought for you, but I whispered to myself me too. I had been hurting for a long time.

When we went our separate ways, I was afraid that you’d forget about me. That you’d forget about me waiting every single day at the train station to walk with you. That you’d forget about me hugging you like I would never see you again, even if I was seeing you the next day. That you’d forget that I loved you.

Even if this heartache takes me weeks, months, or even years to get over, I hope you’ll find the happiness that you couldn’t find with me. I hope you’ll find a girl that you can look at with a sparkle in your eyes.

I hope she’ll read the same books as you and that you’ll be able to engage in the ‘intellectual conversations’ that you never could have had with me. I hope you’ll talk about her the same way I spoke about you. I hope that you’ll be able to make time for her, even though you never could make it for me.

As the days pass, you’ll slowly fizz out and become a memory. Now, I wake up and there aren’t any more ‘good morning’ messages. The goofy snapchats you used to send me are gone. The endless phone calls we’d have throughout the day have disappeared. I want you to become a memory. I don’t want to think about you anymore. However, I think I’ll still miss you for a long time.

I loved you too much. I loved you to the point where I gave so much to you, I had nothing left for myself. Thought Catalog Logo Mark